How empathy works
What are the mechanics of empathy? Why is empathy so important in design? How is having empathy different from just being informed?
My favorite definition of design is broad, optimistic and interdisciplinary, and allows us to look at how empathy fits in with design in a very broad way. It describes design as shaping current situations into preferred ones.
So how does information and empathy impact design as the industry of creating products and services to this end? From my experience, quantity of information is rarely what’s holding us back, often the opposite. We often have reams and decks of information about various aspects of the state of the current experience but the challenge is making sense of it: driving priority, vision and focus. To make sense of it all we need a point of view on what is most important and why. Without a point of view we don’t know where or how to begin, and will likely busy ourselves with trivial short term tasks without addressing the real, hard, rewarding opportunity. When designers are serving the needs of others, their point of view must be aligned with those whose futures they are shaping.
Design empathy harnesses empathy into the service of design to help develop a connection to what is important to others and shape that into a shared point of view for design. The catchword for the process changes over time. Earlier literature called a similar approach Empathic Design. Today the Stanford d.school website defines empathy mode as one of the modes in the process of Design Thinking. You might choose to call it something else. In my mind these are all versions of the same underlying design process and principle.
Empathy is sometimes confused with the way it is sought, and assumed to be equal to visiting a customer, watching a user or interviewing a stakeholder. Getting into the right context is very important, no question, but empathy is a trick of the heart and mind. Most people possess equal capacity and ability for it, regardless of gender or education. The important thing about empathy is that when we engage in it, it changes us:
it changes how we feel,
it changes how we think, and
it changes how we act.
These changes are tremendously beneficial and can be harnessed to fuel the design process. Findings in social neuroscience research explain these processes in more detail: engaging in empathic experiences brings feelings of connectedness by altering the hormonal balance in favor of oxytocin. Engaging in empathy also changes cognitive processes to be field-dependent, making our thinking sensitive to the relationships and dependencies that things have in the world. In addition, engaging in empathy promotes helpfulness in the moment and beyond. All of these changes create positive, outward-focused conditions for collaboration, ideal for solving larger and systemic problems collaboratively, and developing a shared point of view.
But if empathy is innate, what is keeping design empathy from being applied in how people design everywhere? What might prevent empathy from happening? Factors that squash empathy are those that prevent us from being open to the experiences of the other person in general: rigidity, pride, fear, or emotional overload. People as individuals may clam up: they might fear that others challenge their values or threaten their goals, values or even their jobs. They fear being changed and influenced. They might dismiss the point of view of others as irrelevant. Or, they might try to engage, but then become so overwhelmed by their own emotions, positive or negative, that they cannot continue to engage.
I have previously called empathy an “out-of-ego-experience”. This term implies two things: letting go or stepping out of your own perspective, but then returning to it, influenced by the experience. This frame shifting between feeling and thinking is key to applying empathy wisely in design. It takes certain courage, self-control and confidence to let go of the ego — and then bring that experience back in. The surrounding work culture has also a profound impact: work environments generally reward people for doing a specific job in a specified way, and may fail to cultivate empathy, curiosity and caring. But cultures can turn around and start actively building in the expectation for empathy. That allows everyone to practice and improve, to learn to listen and to tell better, sharper, stories and draw out the best of their feeling and thinking.
At the end of the day, a (design) culture that embraces design empathy is a culture of good listeners and storytellers that communicates both emotionally and analytically and never loses sight of what is most important for the situations they are shaping.
Resources
Herbert Simon’s quote on the definition of design comes from The Sciences of the Artificial.
The term “out-of-ego experience” was first used in Empathy on the Edge.
The scientific findings referred to in this short piece are mostly from The Social Neuroscience of Empathy (edited by Decety and Ickes) and to a small degree from The Moral Molecule (Zak).
