Empathy-led Readiness Toolkit for Digital Adoption

The paper aims to demonstrate the value of an empathy-led toolkit that categorises individuals’ digital adoption readiness levels. The toolkit is a self-diagnostic measure for individuals within any organisation to check their readiness to adopt digital technology and seek support as technology reshapes their roles. The web-based toolkit is built to understand and measure an individual's emotional readiness level towards a transition before the introduction of digital technology. This toolkit is created by combining four key methods from the disciplines of design, psychology and computing, i.e. empathy-based storytelling, perception-action model, empathy mapping and empathy algorithm. The paper highlights the value of such a toolkit for the manufacturing and built environment sectors, where emerging technologies are implemented in day-to-day processes. The toolkit's research and development has been funded by InterAct (Economic Social Research Council, UK), and the toolkit has been tested with the global community of professionals and students at the Building Information Modelling in Series at Leicester.