Empathy (un)bounded: realizing the potential of the designer
My first day of design graduate school was Monday morning; Molly Steenson’s Seminar One. Our first assignment was clear: “what [even] is interaction design?” This startling question belied a larger one: Why did I come to Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Design in the first place? I came to explore how I could realize my full potential as an interaction designer. Core to my practice of design is empathy. I first encountered the role of interaction design through this lens. I latched on to this way of creating for the world, especially given what I crave most are deep connections with people. In design, it was core to the process. Jon Kolko, a Carnegie Mellon alumnus, defines design thinking, in part, as involving “empathy with users” (2013). A focus on empathy was the core aspect of design that drew me in, yet my vision of design in empathy remained unsophisticated throughout my professional practice. In Seminar One, I realized it was the tools with which we use to enact empathy as praxis in design as fundamental to fulfilling my vision of the role of the designer.
One of our first tools with which to think we encountered was Gibson’s ecological view of affordances. In Gibson’s view, designers think about the space between the possibilities of a (sometimes abstract) object and how people perceive that object (Gibson, 2014). I imagined that interaction designers, because they craft affordances, or ways of behaving and thinking about behaving in the world, also craft the emergent ways of existing in that world, perhaps even the worlds themselves. I was reminded again of my romantic ideal of the empathetic designer — studying people, climbing into their worlds and creating new, improved worlds with them. I went on to craft a paper that saw the crafting ways of living and existing as core to the designers role. Unacknowledged in the paper, yet fundamentally tied to this creation of affordances was the implicit truth that empathy drives the way we will create worlds for other people.
As we encountered more tools with which to consider design, and thus empathy in design, I realized the ways in which a designer’s sense of empathy is fundamentally bounded. These boundaries exist primarily in the ways in which we conceptualize the environments and beings we design for. For example, Tega Brain (2018) interrogates “a systematic view of the environment,” in which the system is “bounded, knowable and made up of components operating in chains of cause and effect.” A systems view of the environment, particularly as instantiated in machine learning solutions, she argues, dangerously misrepresents our world. Or class teaching assistant and Ph.D. student in Transition Design, Hajira Qazi, introduced us to the project of decolonial design, which (in part) aims to question mainstream design as practiced within “the Anglo-European sphere”, and the ways in which the “power relations and logics of coloniality assert themselves through technologies and techniques” (Ansari 2018).
In week 11 of Seminar One, I encountered the most potent example of a designer’s boundaries with regard to empathy. Classmate Tilo and I were discussion leads for a week in which we were assigned to read Karl Marx’s Das Capital. We gave an overview of our readings via whiteboard drawing to the class, explaining Marx’s articulation of a capitalist system of labor. In this system, a laborer, through their efforts, must to produce labor value for their employer, the capitalist. We then instructed the class to apply this framework to the profession of design through an activity. Using Marx’s framework of the capitalist labor system, my peers mapped out the actors (labor, product, capitalist) in institutions and businesses of today (Uber, Instagram). The constraints of capitalism that we, as professional designers typically work within were now manifested with clarity in the whiteboard drawings our class created. During this process, I had an epiphany: in Marx’s view of a capitalist system, the labor a designer performs must be of monetary value. Further, the work of the laborer logically should not disturb, or reduce the potential earnings the employer’s imperative to make money. Thus, the values of capitalism bound the possibility for designers to empathize outside of this framework.
Where I had previously just sensibilities of this ultimate constraint on my empathic imperative as a designer, I now could see the conceptual structure. Nearly every week, with each new tool with which to see the world, we conversed considered alternative perspectives. As representatives from companies and other well-known figures visited our classrooms and gave talks, we could see the outlines of their worldviews, and consequently those who were left in or out. We discussed whether a designer within a company could only dream of solutions their company could solve with their products. Value Sensitive Design gave us a framework with which to map out the conflicting values and interests of the stakeholders within the worlds we may design for (Friedman, Kahn, Borning, & Huldtgren 2006). David Danks provoked us to consider pragmatism versus idealism, and whether we should “design for the world we have or the world we want.” Finally, Speculative and Critical Design gave us a means with which we could dream of new futures with design. With each new week of readings, we had another lens with which to examine our practice as designers. Expanding the set of tools with which we can think about the world would invariably allow me understand, and perhaps empathize, in a more sophisticated way.
Looking back over the semester, one day in Seminar One crystallized my nascent sensibilities in cultivating empathy: vulnerability. We had the pleasure of having the head of the School of Design, Terry Irwin, in class to discuss transition design, which aims to instrumentalize design for social good. We discussed a key aspect of transition design, mindset and posture. Through our discussion, we noted that, as designers, “developing a mindset and posture of self-compassion is key. The more we learn about which values we hold, the more capable we are to frame problems in different ways.” I asked Terry if it our posture centered around the notion of vulnerability; she agreed. “At the core of this idea is accepting that your own world view is very limited; you may not see things as they really are” (Ploehn 2018). In sum, core to the practice expanding our set of tools with which to think involves an embrace of vulnerability, a humility to accept our fallibility in understanding.
On the last day of Seminar One, Molly asked how we felt about the notion of asking questions of our practice as designers. Should we ever stop questioning? I immediately responded with a “no.” It is questioning that affords designers to seek out new perspectives and tools with which to think. The more of these we can encounter, the more vivid our view of the worlds we create (and the people thriving or flailing within them). Each and every new tool provides designers not only with more nuance with which to craft the consequential ways of existing, but with more imagination to craft equitable ones.
Sources
Ansari, A. (2018, April). What a Decolonisation of Design Involves: Two Programmes for Emancipation, Decolonizing Design. Retrieved from http://www.decolonisingdesign.com/actions-and-interventions/publications/2018/what-a-decolonisation-of-design-involves-by-ahmed-ansari/.
Brain, T. (2018) “The Environment is Not a System,” A Peer-Reviewed Journal about Research Values. Retrieved from http://www.aprja.net/the-environment-is-not-a-system/
Friedman, B., Kahn, P. H., Borning, A., & Huldtgren, A. (2006). “Value Sensitive Design and Information Systems”. Human-Computer Interaction in Management Information Systems: Foundations
Gibson, J. J. (2014). The ecological approach to visual perception. New York, NY: Psychology Press.
Irwin, T. (2018, June). Proceedings from Design Research Society 2018: The Emerging Transition Design Approach. 9Limerick, Ireland
Kolko, J. (2013, September). Design Thinking Comes of Age, Harvard Business Review. Retrieved from https://hbr.org/2015/09/design-thinking-comes-of-age.
Ploehn, C. (2018, September). Seminar 1: Transition design discussion, Medium. Retrieved from https://medium.com/@cploehn/seminar-1-transition-design-discussion-115814651ba6.
