The 4th
EmpathiCH Workshop
(Re-)Thinking Empathy’s Materiality in HCI
April 2026 | Barcelona | In-Person
Watch the episode.
Conversations
with Rachel Adler & Bruno Oro
Workshop Themes
Theme 1:
Empathic Technologies, their Materialities, and Affordances.
Technology’s form and the ways in which it acts in practice strongly shape how it can be used in social contexts and the types of empathic interactions it enables. LLMs and XR exemplify two distinct productions of empathy, affording, respectively, empathic simulation and empathic mediation. This raises open questions for designing systems that increasingly simulate or mediate empathy:
LLMs as technologies simulating empathy
XR as technology mitigating empathy
Theme 2:
Social Practices of Empathy in Design and Research.
Empathy’s role and manifestations in research and design practices take different forms: among researchers and design practitioners, from them towards users, and also vice versa.
Empathic ways to approach the design process, avoiding power dynamics
Effects of different sociological backgrounds on empathic agency
Theme 3:
Context, Situatedness, Intentionality, and Temporality of Empathy.
Empathy’s situatedness within contexts or organizations is an emerging area of study in HCI. Empathy can be leveraged through technological interventions—such as social robots and conversational agents—to maximize short-term gains, subdue users’ conscious agency, or intentionally compromise their dignity. These risks require critical scrutiny of empathy’s situatedness and tools to ensure accountability and ethical use of empathy in organizations.
What is legitimate empathic design, and what institutionalized misuse?
Who profits from empathy?
