In the early stages of the design process, designers explore opportunities by discovering unmet needs and developing innovative concepts as potential solutions. From a human-centered design perspective, designers must develop empathy with people to truly understand their needs. However, developing empathy is a complex and subjective process that relies heavily on the designer's empathic capability. Therefore, the development of empathic understanding is intuitive, and the discovery of underlying needs is often serendipitous. This paper aims to provide insights from artificial intelligence research to indicate the future direction of AI-driven human-centered design, taking into account the essential role of empathy. Specifically, we conduct an interdisciplinary investigation of research areas such as data-driven user studies, empathic understanding development, and artificial empathy. Based on this foundation, we discuss the role that artificial empathy can play in human-centered design and propose an artificial empathy framework for human-centered design. Building on the mechanisms behind empathy and insights from empathic design research, the framework aims to break down the rather complex and subjective concept of empathy into components and modules that can potentially be modeled computationally. Furthermore, we discuss the expected benefits of developing such systems and identify current research gaps to encourage future research efforts.

翻译：在设计过程的早期阶段，设计师通过发现未满足的需求并开发创新概念作为潜在解决方案来探索机会。从以人为本的设计视角出发，设计师必须与用户建立共情才能真正理解其需求。然而，建立共情是一个复杂且主观的过程，严重依赖设计师自身的共情能力。因此，共情理解的形成具有直觉性，而潜在需求的发现往往具有偶然性。本文旨在从人工智能研究中汲取洞见，指明人工智能驱动的以人为本设计的未来方向，同时考虑共情不可或缺的作用。具体而言，我们对数据驱动用户研究、共情理解发展及人工共情等领域进行了跨学科探究。基于此，我们探讨了人工共情在以人为本设计中可能发挥的作用，并提出了面向以人为本设计的人工共情框架。该框架以共情机制和共情设计研究见解为基础，旨在将复杂且主观的共情概念分解为可被计算建模的组件与模块。此外，我们还讨论了开发此类系统的预期收益，并指出现有研究缺口以激励未来研究努力。