Is empathy-driven teaching effective in cultural product design? An empirical study on students' empathy and design creativity.

Introduction: Cultural product design (CPD) education concerns not only students' extraction and translation of traditional cultural elements, but also their understanding of the cultural contexts behind cultural artefacts and the experiences of potential users. Empathy is considered to help designers understand needs, emotions, and contexts from the perspectives of others; however, its role in CPD education remains insufficiently examined through empirical research. This study introduced an empathy-driven instructional approach to examine its associations with students' empathy and design creativity. Methods: The participants were 79 undergraduate students from two intact classes in a CPD course. The two classes were assigned at the class level to either the empathy-driven instructional approach or the traditional instructional approach. The empathy-driven group received systematic guidance based on the empathy-driven instructional approach, whereas the traditional group received the traditional instructional approach. Both groups completed design tasks based on designated cultural artefacts. Results: The results showed that students in the empathy-driven group demonstrated higher levels of empathy than those in the traditional group. The analyses also identified significant indirect associations through empathy between the instructional approach and the novelty and quality of design outcomes, a pattern consistent with partial mediation. Discussion: These findings suggest that the empathy-driven instructional approach in CPD education can help students develop a more integrated understanding of the relationships among artefact contexts, user experiences, and contemporary product experiences, and may support the generation of design outcomes with greater novelty and quality. This study provides preliminary empirical evidence for incorporating empathy training into CPD education.