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Empathy
Published in Monica W. Tracey, John Baaki, Cultivating Professional Identity in Design, 2023
In 1990, Sam Farber watched his beloved wife Betsey struggling to hold her potato peeler due to arthritis. “Why do ordinary kitchen tools have to hurt your hands?” he thought. He promised he would make Betsey a better peeler. The result is OXO, a worldwide company with the goal of designing thoughtful cooking tools. Farber is an empathic designer. Empathic design is an important tool to have in your designer toolbox. It does not replace design, rather it enhances design as it seeks to get closer to the lives and experiences of your audience (Baaki & Tracey, 2019). When you employ empathic design, you will call on your observational skills to learn about your audience and their context as part of the design process with the goal of understanding their experience. Every design decision you make will be made with your audience in the forefront throughout the entire design process. You will reflect, interact, and act on your audience's behavior during design. Embracing empathic design allows you to develop products that are both innovative and responsive to your actual users' needs and desires (Battarbee et al., 2015). It increases your sensitivity to your audience as well as to your design potential. Your ultimate goal as a designer is to engage in empathy and empathic design to create a meaningful design, resulting in a deliverable that answers your audiences' needs.
Empathy in Design: A Discourse Analysis of Industrial Co-Creation Practices
Published in Bo T. Christensen, Linden J. Ball, Kim Halskov, Analysing Design Thinking: Studies of Cross-Cultural Co-Creation, 2017
Justin L. Hess, Nicholas D. Fila
Leonard and Rayport (1997) were arguably the first scholars to describe an “empathic design” approach, and, similar to the wide-ranging conceptualizations of empathy, researchers have described this process in a variety of ways since then. For example, Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, and Koskinen (2014) indicated the empathic design research focus has shifted from “elucidating experiences in an interpretive manner,” to “co-design” or facilitating organizational and public collaboration, to “imagination” that goes beyond interpretation only (p. 69). More pointedly, Mattelmäki et al. (2014) suggested empathic design “focuses on everyday life experiences, and on individual desires, moods, and emotions in human activities, turning such experiences and emotions into inspirations” (p. 67). To achieve such an experience-to-inspiration translation, Postma et al. (2012) indicated that empathic designers must shift between participatory and expert mindsets. Specifically, they recognized four principles of empathic design: (a) “balancing rationality and emotions in building understanding of users’ experiences,” (b) making “empathic inferences about users and their possible futures,” (c) “involving users as partners in NPD [new product development],” and (d) engaging “design team members as multi-disciplinary experts in performing user research” (p. 60).
Case study: gender equality (SDG5)
Published in Emmanuel Tsekleves, Rachel Cooper, Jak Spencer, Design for Global Challenges and Goals, 2021
Komal Faiz, Yong Adilah Binti Shamsul Harumain, Andree Woodcock, Deana McDonagh
Design thinking supported by empathic design research provides the opportunity to approach and view complex problems from different perspectives beyond traditional quantitative approaches. Using site knowledge exchange visits, the multidisciplinary female research team pooled their expertise conducting self-ethnography to develop a deeper, richer and first-hand experience of gender transport poverty. We all experienced the activities of everyday living (e.g. public transportation, walking down the main street) in each country (Pakistan, Malaysia and the UK). This moved the team’s understanding from a ‘felt sense’ to a deeper ‘felt experience’. Based in grounded theory, this design research approach revealed similar and different challenges.
Unboxing empathy: reflecting on architectural design for maternal health
Published in CoDesign, 2022
Helena Sandman, Tarek Meguid, Jarkko Levänen
In the empathic design approach, the users inform designers. However, this approach can sometimes be superficial due to a rigid focus on methods that lack culturally embodied critical engagement because the format of the methods might not be customised according to the users (Akama, Hagen, and Whaanga-Schollum 2019). In the design project we discussed in the previous section, a great deal of information and understanding was shared through encounters in the form of dialogue. Nonetheless, we noticed that if this dialogue was not conducted with sensitivity – if, for instance, it happened in a hurry, in an uncomfortable space, or if there were uncertainties – emotions might be misinterpreted and the sense of openness disappear. Additionally, focusing on the user’s point of view alone might exclude other components, as in our example of the baby box in section 3.4.2, when only in a later stage was the complete situation revealed to us. There are also risks we need to be aware of when taking an empathic approach. Anthropologist and psychoanalyst Douglas Hollan (2017) warned that knowledge obtained through an empathic approach can be misused, even if the original intentions were good. For instance, as designers, we need to be aware that personal information shared in confidence might be revealed through design solutions.
Exploring theatrical costume design as a pedagogical tool for empathic design
Published in International Journal of Fashion Design, Technology and Education, 2019
Leading academics and consultancies of the industrial design field have explored a relatively new design approach called empathic design. Empathic design is defined as user-centered design approaches to understand the potential users’ feelings for and experiences with a product or service in their own living environment (Koskinen & Battarbee, 2003; Landwehr, 2007; Leonard & Rayport, 1997; Postma et al., 2012). The empathic design process, therefore, accentuates close observation and interpretation of what potential customers feel and need in their circumstances (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford, 2013). With their extensive in-depth observation in the field, empathic designers endeavor to uncover even the unconscious desires of users that traditional marketing approaches often do not recognise.
Co-creation for empathy and mutual learning: a framework for design in health and social care
Published in CoDesign, 2021
The role of empathy has been discussed mainly in two ways in design: the first one is emphatic design (designing with empathy) and the second one is design for empathy as mentioned before. Empathic design could be seen as an approach to understand people, people’s feelings, needs, desires, lives and contexts and create solutions that would lead designers to design with empathy for users; empathic design has been highly taken into consideration in the design research literature. Dandavate, Sanders, and Stuart (1996) for instance argue that having empathy of people’s emotions or lack of empathy could prove why some products got closely linked with users’ lives while others did not and argue that user empathy needs to be part of generative and evaluative research phases of the design process (Dandavate, Sanders, and Stuart 1996; Hanington 2007; Hanington and Martin 2012; Visser, Van der Lugt, and Stappers 2007). Leonard and Rayport (1997) point to empathic design’s potential to spark innovation and put forward four essentials of empathic design for designers such as ‘unusual collaborative skills’, ‘open-mindedness, observational skills and curiosity’, ‘visual information’ and the ‘eyes of a fresh observer’. In respect to a deep understanding of user experiences during the design process, Sleeswijk Visser, Van der Lugt, and Stappers (2007, 36) set forth ‘enhancing empathy’, ‘providing inspiration’ and ‘supporting engagement’ as ‘three key qualities of communication’. Mattelmäki, Brandt, and Vaajakallio (2011, 79) discuss different types of representation formats of field research findings and insights and suggest how these could be used in an open-ended way, would allow and inspire other participants such as designers and other stakeholders to make new interpretations that could lead to an ‘empathic understanding and engagement’. While this idea focuses on the development of a greater understanding of users through empathy, the authors emphasise the nature of field research findings and insights as being open-ended and incomplete which provide new individual interpretations from various participants in the collaborative design process; this situation leads to empathic understanding and engagement.