Welcome to D&AD’s Creative Empathy course

Welcome to D&AD’s course on Creative Empathy.

For those in the creative industries, the skill of empathy is one of the most essential. It helps you connect and understand your audience, gives you the power to change their behavior and think, feel and do something new, and ultimately helps you to creative powerful and impactful creative work.

This course is designed to give you the tools and techniques to help you think outside of your bubble, step into the shoes of your audience and really get under their skin to explore their motivations, emotions, hopes and fears. We know that with this power comes responsibility, so we’ll also be exploring the ethics of empathy in creative communication.

We will be asking you to contribute to discussions throughout the course, and you will have the opportunity to apply your learnings to a current brief, or to a practice brief that we will provide.

Week 1: Understanding your audience.

Week 1 is dedicated to exploring why understanding audience is so important, and moving on to how to begin to conduct effective research. Through a series of industry interviews, tutorials and exercises, you will cover:

1. Who is your audience

• Understanding why empathy matters in the creative industry
• How to define your audience from your brief

2. Research and data

• Understand qualitative data
• Understand quantitative data
• Techniques to go beyond the obvious and discover deep truths about your audience

3. Understanding your research

• How to move from data through to insight

Before we dive in, let’s meet the industry voices who will be guiding you through the course.