Socially aware persuasive games that use immersive technologies often appeal to empathy, prompting users to feel and understand the struggles of another. However, the often sought-after standing in another's shoes' experience, in which users virtually inhabit another in distress, may complicate other-oriented empathy. Following a Research through Design approach, we designed for other-oriented empathy - focusing on a partaker-perspective and diegetic reflection - which resulted in Permanent; a virtual reality game designed to foster empathy towards evacuees from the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster. We deployed Permanent 'in the wild' and carried out a qualitative study with 78 participants in the Netherlands and Japan to capture user experiences. Content Analysis of the data showed a predominance of other-oriented empathy across countries, and in our Thematic Analysis, we identified the themes of 'Spatial, Other, and Self -Awareness', 'Personal Accounts', 'Ambivalence', and 'Transdiegetic Items', resulting in design insights for fostering other-oriented empathy through virtual reality.
Ulus Baker (1960 – 2007) was a Turkish-Cypriot sociologist, philosopher, and public intellectual. He was born in Ankara, Turkey in 1960. He studied Sociology at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, where he taught as a lecturer until 2004. Baker wrote prolifically in influential Turkish journals and made some of the first Turkish translations of various works of Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and other contemporary political philosophers. His profuse and accessible work and the novelty of the issues he enthusiastically introduced to Turkish-speaking intellectual circles, earned him a widely spread positive reputation in early age. He died in 2007 in Istanbul.The text in this edition is edited from essays and notes Ulus Baker wrote between 1995 and 2002. In these essays, Baker criticizes the sociological research turning into an analysis of people’s opinions. He explores with an exciting clarity the notion of ‘opinion’ as a specific form of apprehension between knowledge and point of view, then looks into ‘social types’ as an analytical device deployed by early sociologists. He associates the form of ‘comprehension’ the ‘social types’ postulate with Spinoza’s notion of ‘affections’ (as a dynamic, non-linguistic form of the relation between entities). He finally discusses the possibilities of reintroducing this device for understanding our contemporary world through cinema and documentary filmmaking, by reinstating images in general as ‘affective thought processes’.Baker’s first extensive translation to English provides us with a much-needed intervention for re-imagining social thought and visual media, at a time when sociology tends to be reduced to an analysis of ‘big data’, and the pedagogical powers of the image are reduced to data visualization and infographics.
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Abundant HCI research exists on the many assistive technologies that provide help with everyday physical and cognitive tasks. However, while a purely assistive approach often casts aging people in passive roles, recent studies suggest that adults may be ‘flourishing’ way into advanced age, even though implicit ageist prejudices are difficult to eradicate. Negative age-related stereotypes are the hidden and yet urgent issue we address in this study. There is a clear opportunity for an anti-ageist perspective in HCI, an approach that we propose as complementary to assistive technologies: in addition to providing solutions for the aging population, we urgently call for designs about aging, to spark a conversation on age, raise awareness and ultimately contrast ageist stereotypes. We point at empathy as a key element to reconceptualize, at least in part, HCI’s contribution to research on aging. We present a design critique of two interactive pieces that, although not without flaws, suggest how future empathy-raising artifacts might be. Our analysis combines pragmatist aesthetics, interaction criticism and ludology, and yields four design tactics (recurring configurations of significant elements) that are generative in bringing about broader design implications towards a different, empathy-based concept of aging in HCI.
