A Study Of Product Design For The Visually Impaired Based On The Fusion Of Empathy Theory And The Five Senses Design Concept

With the development of the times,products for normal people are becoming more and more perfect in terms of experience and emotional care,but products for visually impaired people are relatively scarce,poor in experience and low in popularity,which is the verification of the main contradiction of our society in the new era:the contradiction between people’s growing need for a better life and unbalanced and insufficient development.This is not only in the visual aspect,but also in the sense of touch and hearing of visually impaired people,based on the doctrine of compensation,which is largely superior to that of normal people.This makes it difficult for most designers,as normal people,to restore the feelings of visually impaired people from their own perspective with empathy,and thus design products that are difficult to meet their real needs."Empathy" is the ability to put oneself in the other person’s shoes.If designers have strong empathy for the visually impaired,they can discover their true feelings and guide their designs.Empathy theory is the theory of gaining empathy for the object,and the empathy operation through psychological interchange matches the object’s mental model as much as possible,which will have practical significance in the process of gaining empathy for the visually impaired,but the physiological characteristics of the visually impaired are quite different from those of normal people,and it will be difficult to gain empathy better without considering the physiological disparities in the empathy process.Therefore,in this study,the five senses design was incorporated into the empathy process,so as to extract the feelings of the visually impaired people to a greater extent during the empathy process and obtain better empathy.This study combines the characteristics of previous empathy theory practices and breaks down the empathy theory into three steps:"empathy," "perception," and "withdrawal," and crosses each step into the consideration of adding the five senses.The five senses are considered in each step,and the five senses advance linearly along with empathy to achieve the effect of empathy.In order to verify the effect of empathy theory,this study designed a control trial,combining the comparison of the mean values of the two groups and the end-of-experiment interviews to determine the effect of the five senses on empathy.The results of the study found that the inclusion of the five senses in the empathy process had a positive effect on the empathy effect,especially when describing the feelings of the visually impaired in detail.This study will help provide a case study for the application of empathy theory in design practice,and provide a solution to optimize the product development process for the visually impaired.