A Journey Through Empathica – A visual companion for soft hearts in a loud world
I’ve felt it – that gnawing sense of helplessness.
The creeping guilt of being safe while others suffer.
The ache of feeling like my actions will never be enough.
With everything happening in the world – the wars, the injustice, the constant flood of horrific news – it’s easy to feel lost & hopeless.
And yet, as a designer & changemaker, I can’t look the other way.
But I also don’t want to drown in despair.
This tension led me to a question I kept returning to:
How can we stay emotionally engaged without being consumed by the weight?
This project is my way of sitting with that question.
The answer came, quietly, in the form of compassion.
A Journey Through Empathica is a long-form, illustrated narrative that visualizes the emotional impact of empathic distress – the state of distress we experience when faced with too much suffering, too often.
It follows a ripple-haired character through a surreal landscape of emotional fatigue, numbness, reflection, and, eventually, the slow return to care.
The format is a concertina – a fold-out, flowing paper journey that mirrors the inner landscape of emotions.
This is not a toolkit. It’s not a how-to.
It’s a companion – A visual space to rest, reflect, and begin again, gently.
The goal isn’t to fix anything, but to remind us:
Even when care feels heavy, it’s still worth seeing it through.
Throughout this project, I arrived at this research question:
How can visual communication help young adults process empathic distress and connect with compassion, offering space for emotional engagement and reflection in response to distressing media content?
Rather than providing direct answers – explaining or instructing – I desired to create something that felt like a pause.
A moment to be with the weight of feeling – not fix it, not escape it, but move through it.
I focused on creating an emotional journey using visual metaphors, pacing, and quiet design details to guide the reader gently.
Early in the process, I had a conversation with the founder of the non-profit Compassionate Sweden, whose insights on care and the emotional toll of care work have helped shape the direction of this project.
From there, I let intuition, storytelling, and emotional resonance guide the design.
The process was a rollercoaster – starting with the idea of developing a toolkit, then a zine, until the project finally unfolded into this long-form concertina that you see here.
Ultimately, it became what it needed to be: not a system to follow, but a landscape to move through – softly, slowly, and at your own pace.
This project is both personal and political.
A form of resistance that values softness.
A quiet act of design that chooses feeling over numbness and detachment.
When the world is too much, let softness be the thing that keeps you whole
