(Thanks to Amanda Meeks at Northern Arizona University for sharing her insight into her development of an avatar-based method for promoting empathy in classrooms and for allowing their use in other learning spaces, including clinical settings.)

Students learn about empathic design, and how they can leverage empathic design thinking to promote health information literacy. This assignment is designed primarily for occupational therapy students, but is applicable across allied health programs as well as in health policy and consumer health programs. For the back half of the lesson, students work in groups to apply design thinking for clients/patients who belong to a specific healthcare community (the communities listed are all local, so may need to be changed). They will then return for another class and learn how to create literacy-driven deliverables for those clients/patients.