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 empathetic capability. Therefore, the development of empathetic 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, empathetic 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 empathetic 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：在设计过程早期，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。从人本设计视角出发，设计师必须建立对他人的共情才能真正理解其需求。然而，共情的培养是一个复杂且主观的过程，严重依赖设计师的共情能力。因此，共情理解的形成具有直觉性，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获取洞见，指出在考虑共情核心作用的前提下，AI驱动的人本设计的未来发展方向。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研究领域进行了跨学科探索。在此基础上，我们讨论了人工共情在人本设计中可发挥的作用，并提出面向人本设计的人工共情框架。该框架基于共情背后的机制及共情设计研究的洞见，旨在将共情这一复杂且主观的概念分解为可被计算建模的组件与模块。此外，我们讨论了开发此类系统的预期效益，并指出现有研究空白，以鼓励未来研究工作。