An experiential design that is designed to stimulate the empathy of students from host country on the international students who are coming to study in their country.

Design Purpose

This is an experiential design that is designed to stimulate the empathy of students from host country on the international students who are coming to study in their country.

Scenario

Thai students are the tourists who are travelling to Myanmar. They went to a Burmese restaurant which only has Burmese menu and the waitress who speaks only Burmese. They have to manage to order anyway because they are hungry and they want to eat.

Design process

We did a focus group with cohort 6 international students of GSSE. We asked them to reflect on their experiences during their first few weeks in Thailand. They talked about communication challenges in terms of finding direction and finding food due to language barriers. We found food topic more interesting. So we directed ourselves to do something about food.

Then we went back to them to ask more about the difficulties that they have faced about food in Thailand. They talked about food poisoning due to the spiciness, difficulty to order food because of Thai Menu and lack of knowledge about available variety of choices. Based on that, we got inspired to create an experiential design for a Thai person to experience what an international student have to face when they want to eat food at a Thai restaurant.

Insight sharing and brainstorming

Insights and brainstorming ideas

Order food and get something else,

(verbal)Menu in Thai, cannot even attempt

Eng menu, no number,

Seller has to look at the menu again or ask again since they cannot understand English.

Even when you can read Thai, you don’t know all Thai dishes, so what you expect and what you get can be totally different.

Mash-up. (get out of your usual environment) eg. Thai student ordering from Burmese restaurant. What if all the menus are in another language that we don’t understand?

Prototype and testing

"Wow. I can feel that!" - Participant

Reflection

When we asked them about the experience, They replied that they could feel how frustrating it was to communicate with a person who doesn’t know their language while ordering food. When we shared the stories about their international friends, one of them immediately said, “Wow. I can feel that!”. They reflected that now they came to understand more on what their international friends have been facing. Their reflection indicated that this experiential design stimulated their empathy on their international students.

Limitations

As our group consisted of only international students, we couldn’t target Thai restaurant owners to be the user of our design. Therefore, we chose Thai students who could speak English instead just because of language barrier.

Due to budget constraint, we also couldn’t take our users to real Burmese restaurant in downtown. We just went to AIT (Asian Institute of Technology) canteen for our prototype with one of us pretending to be a Burmese waitress. Our user suggested to make the environment to be more realistic in order to feel the pure experience.

Conclusion

As this experiential design aimed to stimulate the empathy of a Thai towards an international students, the design have somewhat reached the aim. However, we might need to make the environment more realistic than this in order to facilitate better experience.

Burmese Menu and Empathy