LORA V. KOYCHEVA Technical University of Munich [s2If is_user_logged_in()]DOWNLOAD PDF [/s2If] [s2If current_user_can(access_s2member_level1)] [/s2If] Questions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human-centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near-formulaic and pro-forma endeavor. To catalyze a reworking of the concept, in this paper I synthesize what has been said so far of empathy and its role in design and innovation, and I take stock of what these contributions point to. I ask: “How can we think of empathy as a scalar phenomenon and thus re-scale it in innovation?” I offer some illustrative, if unresolved, tensions with empathy I have had in my own ethnographic work with a robotics start-up, and I conclude the article with a series of provocations with the hope they will be taken up further. Keywords: empathy, ethnography, design thinking, robotics Article citation:...