Empathy in museums, as one timely panel presentation at the recent AAM conference coined it, is a “hot (but tricky) concept.”* While in the past decade empathy has been garnering much interest in neuroscience, IT, design, education, entrepreneurship, and social entrepreneurship communities, it is an emerging subject in the museum world, and comes with a multitude of potential applications. Currently, there are three main approaches that are shaping up:
Museums as empathetic institutions (e.g. institutional empathy, as it might be reflected through the diversity of a museum’s workforce, or the speed that it reacts to social events within its community. Design-thinking methodology, which begins with empathetic fieldwork, is often used within this context to make museums more human-centric.)
