Empathic Design: Human-Centered Design & Design Thinking

Empathy, not technology, is the mother of innovation: that was the surprising lesson learnt by a group of MBA students and entrepreneurs at a workshop led by IDEO and Google Labs at Silicon Valley 

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“Having been through the empathy exercise

we had a very different view of what was

really important to our customer compared

with what I probably would have

imagined before.” 

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Via Edwin Rutsch

Tom and David Kelley of the award-winning Palo Alto-based global design firm IDEO have been helping private and public sector organizations innovate, grow and bring to market new ideas for 35 years...

 

The notion of empathy and human-centeredness
is still not widely practiced
in many corporations.

Business people rarely navigate their own websites or watch how people use their products in a real-world setting.

And if you do a word association with
“business person,” the word “empathy”
doesn't come up much.

 

What do we mean by empathy in terms of creativity and innovation? For us, it’s the ability to see an experience through another person’s eyes, to recognize why people do what they do. It’s when you go into the field and watch people interact with products and services in real time—what we sometimes refer to as “design research.” Gaining empathy can take some time and resourcefulness. But there is nothing like observing the person you’re creating something for to spark new insights.

And when you specifically set out to empathize
with your end user, you get your own ego
out of the way.

We’ve found that figuring out what other people actually need is what leads to the most significant innovations. In other words, empathy is a gateway to better and sometimes surprising insights that can help distinguish your idea or approach.

 

By Tom Kelley and David Kelley

Via Edwin Rutsch

The ability to empathise is recognised as a crucial soft skill that web designers, writers and managers require. However, empathy needs more than an intellectual understanding.

If you spend anytime at all reading the plethora of articles on designing or running websites, it won’t take you long to encounter the word empathy.

The user centric movement obsesses (rightfully so) about understanding users. We create personas, customer journeys and empathy maps. We run focus groups, user test sessions and emotional response tests.

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And yet with all of our techniques and tools,'

I am not convinced we really ever

actually' empathise.

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by Paul Boag

Via Edwin Rutsch

But surely SOCIAL entrepreneurs are empathetic?

While social entrepreneurs like Ashoka’s Bill Drayton or Oxford Business School’s Pamela Hartigan are quite right that you cannot be truly profitable if you are not wired for empathy, this does not mean that it’s not hard.  It’s not just technology and social media that’s to blame. Based on my own experience, there is something that happens from that “road to Damascus moment” (essential to the foundational tales of many social entrepreneurs from Jacqueline Novogratz’s moment of finding a boy in Africa wearing her old blue sweater to John Woods discovering the need for libraries in the Himalayas) in which a stubborn, passionate person is confronted with the immediate and direct experience of an obstacle that they are determined to remove, come hell or high water. 

  ================

you cannot be truly profitable if

you are not wired for empathy, 

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But now as people strive to create the most social change and demonstrate the data of their impact, does something still get lost? One of our queen word smiths, Monika Smyczek, asked over a late-night “Launchathon” (our own version of hackathons where we dissected and championed one another’s businesses) the key question that anyone must ask as they try to retain empathy in the DNA of an organization: “How do you scale Gandhi?”

Via Edwin Rutsch

We, the design community, talk (and write and speak) a lot about empathy.  We lament the empathy deficit in our companies and clients and cry "something must be done about this."

We tout personas, empathy maps, experience maps, and other methods as empathy deficit reducers that lead to better experiences (and profits). Some, at the extremes, position human-centered designers as Platonic figures releasing stakeholders from the shadows of opinion and faceless analytics into the reality of human emotions, needs, and desires. 

 

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We tout personas, empathy maps,
experience maps, and other methods

as empathy deficit reducers that lead

to better experiences (and profits).

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We talk a lot about other people's empathy. But what about your own? What about mine? 

How empathetic am I?

by patrick quattlebaum 

Via Edwin Rutsch

This is the second post in a 6-part series from Ziba's Industrial Design Director, Paul Backett, on rethinking design education. Read the Introduction to the series,Teach Less, Integrate More here.

Great designers are great empathizers. It's what separates a design that has soul from one that's simply well-realized. In my experience as a design director and as a teacher, it's become painfully clear that the ability to connect with users is something design students must learn, as crucially as they need sketching and CAD.

Unfortunately, the most common student design project has students designing with themselves as the target user. Research becomes a box to be ticked, and certainly never integrated into the design process.

The real world, though, is full of unfamiliar design targets, and schools have a responsibility to teach the difficult skill of taking on their perspectives.

What students need to learn is not just empathy, but extreme empathy—the flexibility to inhabit the mind of someone dramatically unlike themselves. 

 

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Great designers are great empathizers

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core jr 

Designing for Empathy Organizers

Barbara Burton - Artefact Design Group

Dave McGolgin - Artefact Design Group Summary 

Products, messaging, and services have the potential to contribute to a more empathic society, better able to face the scale of our shared problems. As an EPIC member and ethnographer, empathy is your livelihood. In this workshop, we seek to apply your expertise in a new way.

How can our research identify opportunities to create more empathy-rich experiences for our users? What can our designs incorporate to seize these opportunities? In this workshop, we will share examples and co-develop strategies with the goal of actualizing design for preferable outcomes, while also providing a novel approach to innovation. 

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Products, messaging, and services have the

potential to contribute to a more

empathic society, better able to

face the scale of our

shared problems

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Apart from that brief outburst, the faces of the participants in our Human-Centred Design (HCD) workshop are crinkled with concentration as they calculate the number of carbs they consumed in their last meal.

They're not trying the newest low-carb diet, but putting themselves in the shoes of someone with diabetes--feeling, first-hand, what it's like to count their blood glucose levels to ensure they adjust their insulin intake correctly.

 

That walk-a-mile-immersion exercise is just one example of the methods we use to build rapid empathy in which we (as researchers and designers) help our audience (students, clients) to quickly understand the challenges that people face with a product, service, or process. Interestingly, the rapid bit is where the audience actually makes a connection, experiencing empathy for others. As humans, we're wired to feel empathy, so all we need to do is tap into that innate capacity.

 

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That walk-a-mile-immersion exercise is

just one example of the methods we

use to build rapid empathy

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Karsten Fischer

CEO, PDD, global product and service design and innovation consultancy

http://www.pdd.co.uk/blog/2013/02/rapid-empathy/

Rapid Empathy

"You never really know a man until you understand things from his point of view, until you climb into his skin and walk around in it." Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird. 

 Atticus Finch knew that the key to understanding people was building empathy for them. In this post we explore the role of empathy in innovation and our experiences with rapid empathy-building exercises.
So, what is the role of empathy in design and innovation? 

 

Via Edwin Rutsch

Big Idea: "Developing Empathic Leaders Through Design"

Currently the Director of Operations for Design for America (DFA) and a lecturer at the Segal Design Institute at Northwestern University, Sami Nerenberg, a San Francisco native, is passionate about the intersection of design education and local/social impact. 

Imagine interdisciplinary student teams and community members using design to create local, social impact. What about teaching human-centered design to young adults and collaborating community partners through extra-curricular, university-based, student-led design studios that tackle national challenges in education, health, economy and the environment?

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Imagine interdisciplinary student teams and

community members using design to

create local, social impact

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Via Edwin Rutsch

Social is design, as we have seen,  is all about people: with and for people. In order to come closer to understanding the complexity of problems, feelings, habit, needs and opportunities, designer...

 

Empathic design, co-design, participatory design are some of the terms used to indicate a work done with people involving them directly in the design process. These methods allow the creation of empathy between designer and user and the discovery of design opportunities. Many of them are taken from Ethnography and some were (and are ) practiced in Architecture.

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Empathic design, co-design, participatory

design  are some of the terms used to indicate

a work done with people involving them

directly in the design process. 

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Empathy in Design

In realm of design, design-thinking is rooted in empathy, where you try to see from the perspective of a user of a given design or product.  There is a lot more to design thinking than that, but in a nutshell it is about human centered design where empathy is king.

Empathy in Human Services

In the social services field I’ve been striving to lead new thinking in, there is also a focus on empathy when designing quality support services.  For example, in the old days of social services, an institution or bunch of “experts” would often end up designing irrelevant services because the service model was not based on what the client needed and wanted but on what the system needed. In other words, there was a lack of empathy for the individual needs and wishes of the client.

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Nowadays, the best social service designers,

are much like design thinkers; empathizing, 

inquiring more, testing ideas and always 

wondering if a proposed service

is truly relevant to the person

that uses the service.

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By Ben Weinlick

The powerhouse brother team, David Kelley and Tom Kelley, is coming out with a new book this month. Creative Confidence: Unleashing the Creative Potential Within us All...

 

The notion of empathy and human-centeredness is still not widely practiced in many corporations. Business people rarely navigate their own websites or watch how people use their products in a real-world setting. And if you do a word association with “business person,” the word “empathy” doesn’t come up much.

 

======================

What do we mean by empathy in terms of

creativity and innovation? 

=========

What do we mean by empathy in terms of creativity and innovation? For us, it’s the ability to see an experience through another person’s eyes, to recognize why people do what they do. It’s when you go into the field and watch people interact with products and services in real time—what we sometimes refer to as “design research.” Gaining empathy can take some time and resourcefulness.

Via Edwin Rutsch

A manager plans team-building activities to increase a team's effectiveness. If team members develop better listening skills, such as empathy, they can become more attuned to group needs.

They can communicate more often in response to this emotional information. Showing concern for a speaker's needs makes the speaker feel that he is being heard.

 

Play a Listening Game

Team-building activities promote good listening. A manager can vary Dr. Carl Rogers' listening game by assigning employees to choose a partner and try this activity. The first partner speaks honestly for 30 seconds while the other partner listens.

The second partner must restate what his partner said. This process continues until the second partner can restate the first speaker's main point and the first speaker is satisfied. Then the partners switch roles and play the game again.

 

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Play a Listening Game 

Team-building activities promote good listening.

A manager can vary Dr. Carl Rogers' listening game

by assigning employees to choose

a partner and try this activity. 

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Teach Empathy's Relationship to Customer Service ...
 

Use Role-Playing Activities...
 

Teach Empathy as a Team Asset...

 

by Audra Bianca, Demand Media..

Via Edwin Rutsch

Create. Inform. Engage.

Journalism training, media news & how to's

1. Empathize
 

“Journalists naturally need to be empathetic,” Leticia Britos Cavagnaro told Poynter via Skype. Britos Cavagnaro, adjunct faculty at Stanford School of Engineering’s Technology Ventures Program and associate director of National Center for Engineering Pathways to Innovation (Epicenter), co-teaches the d.school’s creativity and innovation class with Tina Seelig.

Most people come to a “story with an idea, a perspective or a hypothesis,” she said; being empathetic means having the “ability to talk to someone and really let go of those preconceptions.”

 

The goal of empathy is to gain insight or “put myself in the shoes of the other person or the many different stakeholders,” Britos Cavagnaro said. 

Use empathy by asking open-ended questions and actively listening to uncover people’s needs and motivations.

Asking “Why?” often is effective.

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The goal of empathy is to gain insight or

“put myself in the shoes of the

other person or the many

different stakeholders,”

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by Anna Li

Via Edwin Rutsch

The ability to see the world through the eyes of others can help companies develop new products

 

Empathy is the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. It’s far more than just being a nice person. If properly developed, empathy can give you and your company a distinct competitive edge. Negotiating a contract, dealing with workplace conflicts, coming up with a marketing campaign, or dreaming up the next must-have consumer gadget all require the ability to see the world through eyes that aren’t your own.

 

Sadly, managers and human resource departments too often neglect the interpersonal skills that are so essential to achieving results.

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If properly developed, empathy can

give you and your company a

distinct competitive edge.

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TODD HIRSCH

Via Edwin Rutsch

If You Don't Have Empathy, Create It

Snowboarding giant Burton is able to innovate without focus groups because it couldn't possibly do otherwise. When every person on your team is steeped in sports and the outdoors, solving design problems becomes very personal. One of Ziba's creative directors worked for several years as a designer at Burton.

He recalls how one day a senior designer walked in with a photo of a snowboarder's calf, covered in bruises from a long day on the slopes. "Fix this!" he demanded, and both of them immediately knew that this was a problem worth solving

. They began to look for a solution. Empathy with the user is a powerful tool for innovation. It gives you insight into the problem, but even more important, it makes you care about the outcome.

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Empathy with the user is a powerful tool

for innovation.

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The importance of developing deep connections with the people you serve. 

A few years ago, my publisher asked me to write a book about innovation. They’d read some of the articles I’ve written on the subject over the years, and they wanted more. And although I was flattered, I had to tell them no. The world didn’t need another book on innovation — there are too many as it is. I instead made them a counter-offer: Maybe what the world needed was a book about empathy.

 

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Maybe what the world needed was

a book about empathy.

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At Jump Associates, my colleagues and I have had the chance to collaborate with some of the world’s most amazing companies. And if there’s one thing that we’ve learned in all that time, it’s that companies prosper when they’re able to create widespread empathy for the world around them.

That’s why I ended up writing Wired to Care, which shows how great companies around the world, from Nike to IBM, benefit from building a culture of widespread empathy for the people they serve.

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companies prosper when they’re able

to create widespread empathy for

the world around them.

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