Empathy
tactic#2Empathy is the ability to understand and identify with another person’s context, emotions, goals, and motivations.
Engage : Be interested, , probe, be aware of body language
Check : Be aware of your own responses and judgements.
Listen : To understand rather than to respond
Communicate : Ask questions, exchange information
Carlos Arturo Torres has designed a modular system that lets kids programme their own prosthetics – and this is only the start of toy-based body parts. Iko is the work of the Chicago-based Colombian designer, Carlos Arturo Torres, and is a modular system that allows children to customise their own prosthetics with the ease of clicking together plastic bricks. The only limit is their imagination – and what they can find at the bottom of the Lego box.
It all began in 2006, when about 50 students from Tokyo Gakugei University donated money earned from working part-time with an NGO in India to construct a new school building for the Niranjana Public Welfare School near Bodhgaya, Bihar. The school was established in response to poor educational facilities in the region. Funded by overseas donations, the school grew under the hard work of teachers and volunteers. By 2010, it had enrolled around 400 students from nursery to class 7.
One of the artists who participated in the festival three years in a row was Yusuke Asai. Inspired by traditional Indian wall paintings, Asai filled all the walls and ceiling of a classroom with paintings made using mud. Working with children, he collected soil from various sites in the village and mixed them with water to make pigments. Asai encouraged the children to make hand-prints on the wall as a sign of their hopes for the future.
After the festival, Asai enlisted the children again; this time to help wash away the mud paintings, returning the material to the soil. Through this experience, Asai was teaching them the meaning of life as a cycle in today’s context, by painfully wiping away his own paintings.