Empathy-Centric Design | Andrea Mauri

Designing technology for societal challenges requires more than functional requirements — it requires understanding the perspectives, experiences, and emotions of the people affected. My work in this area develops empathy-centric frameworks that bridge the gap between end-users and decision-makers.

COCTEAU

The COCTEAU (Co-Creating The European Union) tool (Mauri et al., 2022) is an empathy-based platform for participatory decision-making. It uses creative scenarios and role-play mechanics to help citizens and policymakers explore policy options from diverse perspectives.

COCTEAU has been applied to policy challenges in healthcare, housing, and urban planning contexts, and was validated in the context of the EU Horizon project.

EmpathiCH Workshops

I have co-organized the EmpathiCH workshop series at CHI — one of the most competitive venues in HCI — over three consecutive years:

Policy Sandboxing

The Policy Sandboxing framework (Mauri et al., 2024) uses empathy as an enabler for inclusive policy-making, allowing stakeholders to safely explore the impact of policy decisions before implementation. Published in CSCW 2024.

AI for Local Communities

In collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University and TU Delft, I explored how AI tools can empower local communities in civic engagement and environmental monitoring (Hsu et al., 2022).

References

2024

CHI EA

EmpathiCH: Scrutinizing Empathy-Centric Design Beyond the Individual

Alok Debnath, Allison Lahnala, Ugur Genc, and 9 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA), 2024

Bib

@inproceedings{alok2024empathich,
  title = {EmpathiCH: Scrutinizing Empathy-Centric Design Beyond the Individual},
  author = {Debnath, Alok and Lahnala, Allison and Genc, Ugur and Soubutts, Ewan and Lahav, Michal and Horne, Tiffanie and Meijer, Wo and Pai, Yun Suen and Hsu, Yen-Chia and Barbareschi, Giulia and Verma, Himanshu and Mauri, Andrea},
  booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA)},
  year = {2024},
}

CSCW

Policy Sandboxing: Empathy As An Enabler Towards Inclusive Policy-Making

Andrea Mauri, Yen-Chia Hsu, Himanshu Verma, and 3 more authors

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW), 2024

Bib

@article{mauri2024policy,
  title = {Policy Sandboxing: Empathy As An Enabler Towards Inclusive Policy-Making},
  author = {Mauri, Andrea and Hsu, Yen-Chia and Verma, Himanshu and Tocchetti, Andrea and Brambilla, Marco and Bozzon, Alessandro},
  journal = {Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW)},
  volume = {8},
  number = {CSCW2},
  pages = {369:1--369:32},
  year = {2024},
  publisher = {ACM},
}

2023

CHI EA

The EmpathiCH Workshop: Unraveling Empathy-Centric Design

Luce Drouet, Wo Meijer, Aisling Ann O’Kane, and 4 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA), 2023

Bib

@inproceedings{luce2023empathich_chi,
  title = {The EmpathiCH Workshop: Unraveling Empathy-Centric Design},
  author = {Drouet, Luce and Meijer, Wo and O'Kane, Aisling Ann and Singh, Aneesha and Wambsganss, Thiemo and Mauri, Andrea and Verma, Himanshu},
  booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA)},
  pages = {1--7},
  year = {2023},
}

2022

TheWebConf

COCTEAU: an Empathy-Based Tool for Decision-Making

Andrea Mauri, Andrea Tocchetti, Lorenzo Corti, and 3 more authors

The Web Conference – Demo/Poster (arXiv:2204.06289), 2022

Bib

@article{mauri2022cocteau,
  title = {COCTEAU: an Empathy-Based Tool for Decision-Making},
  author = {Mauri, Andrea and Tocchetti, Andrea and Corti, Lorenzo and Hsu, Yen-Chia and Verma, Himanshu and Brambilla, Marco},
  journal = {The Web Conference -- Demo/Poster (arXiv:2204.06289)},
  year = {2022},
}

CHI EA

Empathy-Centric Design At Scale

Andrea Mauri, Yen-Chia Hsu, Marco Brambilla, and 3 more authors

In Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA), 2022

Bib

@inproceedings{mauri2022empathy,
  title = {Empathy-Centric Design At Scale},
  author = {Mauri, Andrea and Hsu, Yen-Chia and Brambilla, Marco and O'Kane, Aisling Ann and Huang, Ting-Hao Kenneth and Verma, Himanshu},
  booktitle = {Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA)},
  pages = {1--6},
  year = {2022},
}

Patterns

Empowering Local Communities Using Artificial Intelligence

Yen-Chia Hsu, Himanshu Verma, Andrea Mauri, and 3 more authors

Patterns, 2022

Bib

@article{hsu2022empowering,
  title = {Empowering Local Communities Using Artificial Intelligence},
  author = {Hsu, Yen-Chia and Verma, Himanshu and Mauri, Andrea and Nourbakhsh, Illah and Bozzon, Alessandro and others},
  journal = {Patterns},
  volume = {3},
  number = {3},
  year = {2022},
  publisher = {Elsevier},
}