Designing for Empathy is a volume of twenty-three essays contributed by multidisciplinary experts, collectively exploring the state of empathy for its design elements that might lead to positive behavior change and a paradigm shift towards unifying, compassionate worldviews and actions. As museums are currently shaping their tools for fostering empathy as an intentional outcome of museum experiences, the idea of empathy-building is shaping them back as socially relevant institutions that increasingly value diversity, accessibility, and equality. This is a non-linear, multi-layered, and multi-dimensional transformation that requires multidisciplinary, cross-industries, and cross-sectors alliances for its sustainability. The potential of this collective transformation effort includes the invention of unconventional, evidence-based, and sustainable solutions that can be scaled up beyond the walls of traditional museums to all kinds of informal learning platforms to help eliminate the empathy-deficit in our world. Designing for Empathy expands our understanding of empathy and its potential for fostering compassionate worldviews and actions through a multidisciplinary exploration in three parts: "The Object of Our Empathy" explores how we define and perceive the "Other," "The Alchemy of Empathy" introduces thirteen design elements of empathy that might lead to transformative learning experiences, and "The Scope and the Spectrum of Empathy" highlights the importance of positioning empathy as a cross-industrial shared value for the benefit of people and the planet. Designing for Empathy will inspire and empower those who are interested in intentionally designing for empathy to cultivate compassionate worldviews and actions that celebrate and preserve the oneness of all people, the environment, and our planet.

Empathy is an essential leadership skill and a cornerstone of good relationships—but it can be hard to access when it's most needed. Luckily, empathy is also a learnable skill, with the power to move conversations out of gridlock and pain. With mindfulness, empathy has deescalated conflicts, combated loneliness, and built human connections in the most unlikely places. With this book, readers will learn how anger and blame get translated and productive dialogues made possible, how to repair arguments before they cause damage, and how self-empathy transforms relationships. With more than 70 stories collected from Nonviolent Communication trainers and practitioners around the world, readers will encounter new ways to talk to the people in their lives and learn techniques for empathizing with one's self and with others at home, at work, and in the community.

Recent developments in the field of archaeology are not only progressing archaeological fieldwork but also changing the way we practise and present archaeology today. As these digital technologies are being used more and more every day on excavations or in museums, this also means that we must change the way we approach teaching and communicating archaeology as a discipline. The communication of archaeology is an often neglected but ever more important part of the profession. Instead of traditional lectures and museum displays, we can interact with the past in various ways. Students of archaeology today need to learn and understand these technologies, but can on the other hand also profit from them in creative ways of teaching and learning. The same holds true for visitors to a museum. This volume presents the outcome of a two-day international symposium on digital methods in teaching and learning in archaeology held at the University of Cologne in October 2018 addressing exactly this topic. Specialists from around the world share their views on the newest developments in the field of archaeology and the way we teach these with the help of archaeogaming, augmented and virtual reality, 3D reconstruction and many more. Thirteen chapters cover different approaches to teaching and learning archaeology in universities and museums and offer insights into modern-day ways to communicate the past in a digital age.

Fostering Empathy through Museums features fifteen case studies with clear take-away ideas, and lessons learned by vividly illustrating a spectrum of approaches in the way museums are currently employing empathy, a critical skill that is relevant to personal, institutional, economical, and societal progress. The need is rapidly growing for empathy to serve as a lens through which we find our purpose and connection in a complex world. This demand brings with it an appetite to cultivate it through safe and trusted platforms. Museums are uniquely equipped to undertake this important mission. This book will help museum staff and leadership at all levels working at a variety of museums (from animal sanctuaries to art museums, from historic house museums to children's and science museums) to better understand the multitude of ways how empathy can be cultivated, and employed in museum setting. Fostering Empathy through Museums will provide inspiration, examples, and lessons learned from a balanced spectrum of museums currently employing empathy in museum setting: as an educational tool to better connect their content with the audience, as an integral element of a museum's institutional values and behavior, and as a phenomenon that is worthy of exploration on its own and as an intentional outcome. This publication provides museum professionals as well as formal and informal learning educators to receive an overview of the variety of approaches to empathy in museums, and to create a shared language and methodologies that could enable them to utilize and nurture empathy as a "shared vision" that would serve not only their organizational mission, but also the greater good. Empathy can be a tool, or an intentional outcome depending on the institution’s objectives. Regardless of the choice, the ideas presented in this book are intended to inform and inspire institutions to unlock exciting possibilities in the areas of improved visitor experience, creative community partnerships, and contribution to social progress by bringing empathy to public discourse through institutional strategies, exhibitions, experiences, and programs. The book also provides ideas for future strategies where empathy is considered as a "shared vision" by museums, and a product of a museum experience that might lead to positive social impact.

MCN's 2018 conference, Humanizing the Digital, explored how museums can use technology to foster human connection and dialogue, advance accessibility and inclusion, and champion inquiry and knowledge. After witnessing the presentations and rich conversations that arose from them, a group of practitioners came together to explore how best to capture and disseminate the learnings that occurred at the conference. The outcome was a decision to solicit and publish a book inspired by the conference and its ideas. Humanizing the Digital: Unproceedings from the MCN 2018 Conference contains 17 conference-inspired responses to the state of museum technology in 2018, including essays, reflections, case studies, conversations, and an experimental in-book zine. The topics explore areas as diverse as calm technology, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality, visitor-centered communication, interpretation and programming, empathy, inclusion and slow change.NOTE: All profits from books purchased directly from the publishers will go towards the MCN scholarship program, which helps new people attend the MCN conference. We encourage attentive online shopping choices, as purchases from other sellers will decrease contributions to support the MCN community.

Slow Looking provides a robust argument for the importance of slow looking in learning environments both general and specialized, formal and informal, and its connection to major concepts in teaching, learning, and knowledge. A museum-originated practice increasingly seen as holding wide educational benefits, slow looking contends that patient, immersive attention to content can produce active cognitive opportunities for meaning-making and critical thinking that may not be possible though high-speed means of information delivery. Addressing the multi-disciplinary applications of this purposeful behavioral practice, this book draws examples from the visual arts, literature, science, and everyday life, using original, real-world scenarios to illustrate the complexities and rewards of slow looking.

A surprising, sweeping, and deeply researched history of empathy—from late-nineteenth-century German aesthetics to mirror neurons†‹ Empathy: A History tells the fascinating and largely unknown story of the first appearance of “empathy” in 1908 and tracks its shifting meanings over the following century. Despite empathy’s ubiquity today, few realize that it began as a translation of Einfühlung or “in-feeling” in German psychological aesthetics that described how spectators projected their own feelings and movements into objects of art and nature. Remarkably, this early conception of empathy transformed into its opposite over the ensuing decades. Social scientists and clinical psychologists refashioned empathy to require the deliberate putting aside of one’s feelings to more accurately understand another’s. By the end of World War II, interpersonal empathy entered the mainstream, appearing in advice columns, popular radio and TV, and later in public forums on civil rights. Even as neuroscientists continue to map the brain correlates of empathy, its many dimensions still elude strict scientific description. This meticulously researched book uncovers empathy’s historical layers, offering a rich portrait of the tension between the reach of one’s own imagination and the realities of others’ experiences.