An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums

The increasingly complex problems of our world point out to a fundamental truth: the wellbeing of humanity and our world depends on human beings' understanding that we each are integral to a fragile, indivisible whole: all of humanity and the planet itself. Empathy, our ability to imagine what it might feel like to be the other, is essential to cultivate a sense of belonging and love towards the fragile oneness of existence.
Museums as informal learning platforms that reflect the subjects, themes, and contexts representing all aspects of life, have a unique advantage and a responsibility to intentionally contribute to empathy-building in our world by offering opportunities for experiential learning of empathy as a portal to a deep understanding of our interconnected and interdependent existence. Within this context, empathy is defined as a form of perception, enabling us to connect with ourselves and others through a cultivation of self-knowledge, while awakening us into the interconnectedness and the oneness of being. When we recognize the intrinsic value of each element that makes up the whole, we calibrate and harmonize our attitudes, behaviors and actions towards the other. This is key to take sustainable actions towards major global challenges our world is facing, such as fragmentation, othering, as well as social and environmental injustices.
An Empathy-Building Toolkit for Museums will offer a rich variety of practical and multidisciplinary solutions to empathy-building with potential for adaptation, implementation, and scaling through a variety of museums, and other informal learning platforms, that aspire to become incubators of empathy in their respective sectors, institutions, systems, and communities.

Elif M. Gökçigdem, PhD is a pioneer in positioning museums as empathy-building incubators. She designs encounters that nurture meaning-making and unlock human potential to experience an ever-widening sense of relatedness and belonging. After coining the term empathy-building through museums in 2006, Elif created the Designing for Empathy® Framework, Summit, and Workshops, published three books and set up ONEempathynetwork.com.