Sensory Cards: Fostering Empathy and Connection within Community Groups

The ability to work and collaborate with different groups has become an essential skill in our highly connected and complex society. We face challenges today that cannot be fixed by a single individual and we need to learn how to collaborate on a much greater scale. People are starting to see the value in building communities based on strong relationships and connections, and yet working together is not always easy. This thesis project navigates from the broader context of community building to the local and personal space of relationships. It explores the potential of dialogic artifacts as a means for building empathy and connection within community groups. A series of reflective and exploratory projects were conducted in order to facilitate immersion into the topic and the access to tacit, intuitive knowledge. Psychologists and group facilitators were engaged through participatory design methods and brought important insights on how artifacts can support empathy in human interactions. is research led to the Sensory Cards, a set of visual and tactile cards with suggested guidelines designed to facilitate the communication—access, expression and understanding—of feelings and emotions in community groups.