Project Love

Service Design | Illustration | 2023-2024

A Community Service That Recharges Empathy Through Design

[ Freelance Project ]

About Client

Project love a London design community focus on explore how design methods and practice can create new interactions between people and nature that increase our empathy, tolerance and care to foster greater love in our daily loves.

Team

Kam Chana

Olivia Li

Project Overview

Everything is energy. The conditions of our energy centres affect our behaviour and how we respond to challenging situations. Providing tools and quick measures to help people decompress in the moment and be more receptive to their environment and other people. Being empathic requires you to be grounded and open in order to communicate with empathy.

When our energy centres are running low, we're much like less likely to respond in empathic ways, so we need ways to refill our our empathy resources.

However, despite the wealth of tools and techniques available to enable more empathic responses, it's hard to find effective ones in the moment.Understanding yourself and others requires effort to connect, to seek the truth and hold space to consider a different point of view and so reduces othering and separation, the fundamental challenge of humanity against each other and nature. it expands and creates space to open up new conversations and connections

Our focus ranges across me, us, we, them, nature and spirit.

Why this project...

The Challenge

How might we enable people to connect through love with empathy as pre-requisite

How might we raise level of empathy in society towards self and others

My Role

As part of a multidisciplinary design team, I contributed to Project Love—an initiative exploring how design can nurture empathy and foster love in daily life. Our goal was to cultivate self-empathy as a foundation for compassionate giving, using design to shape meaningful artefacts, rituals, and social interactions.

Designed brand identities, illustrations, and digital assets to communicate the project vision and drive user engagement.
Co-led research and rapid prototyping sessions to map emotional journeys and develop empathy-driven interventions.
Developed and presented project showcases, synthesised feedback, and pitched scalable concepts to prospective partners.

Project Objectives

The project goal is to harness all the knowledge, hacks and tools out there on empathy already and propagate them into the world as the gateway to love.

Design Process

A simplified version of how I got there

We followed the principles of Service Design to enable some rigour around our ideas, anchoring our ideas in research, diverging to expand ideas and converging to focus decisions.
We researched existing empathy theories and tools from science, academia and humanities.
We ran four rounds of ideation synthesising 36 ideas into 5 that we felt most met the brief.
We created prototyped and tested two of the ideas and presented all five ideas to the broader team.

Insight

The problem

In an increasingly toxic, polarised and transactional society people are running out of empathy,

Pursuing self preservation and self survival as our bodies live in stress / threat state
Too much / too little - Empty, overload, empathy exhaustion, congested energy and burnt out
Loneliness - lack of real connection and community
Fleeting empathy - "one minute it's there then gone, puff, just like that"
Hate spiral - fuelling 'otherness' and 'separation' "I can see how people might become racists"

Outcome

Empathy Hack: A collection of tools help people raise, boost and recover their empathy

Our product is empathy, and a global community of empathy evangelists, with whom we can propagate a global movement of empathy that we believe will lead to more compassion and love in society.
We have design a circular model that uses the concept of a two side marketplace of consumers and creators, supported and facilitated by Project Love , with love the Team Empathy.

Touch point 1

Empathy Booklet

Through inspirational quotes about empathy, we help our audience build awareness of the importance of giving and receiving empathy in individual lives.