The unbearably false lightness of empathy research
I have a problem with Design Thinking.
Design thinking is a widely popular multi step approach to design, popularized by the design firm IDEO. Depending on who you ask, design thinking usually has five to eight steps, but the first step (or phase) is always about learning about the user. Be it “Discovery,” “Understanding,” or “Empathy,” the goal is essentially the same: try to get inside your user’s head. Feel your user’s joys and pains. Know what your user is thinking so that you can better predict what they’ll do (and, more specifically, how they’ll interact with your product or service.) Empathize, they say.
So, we follow people, observe, make surveys, interview, recruit for diary studies, sort cards, cluster Post-it notes — all in the name of better “ understanding” how our users operate.
As designers, we are taught that this Discovery-Empathy-Understanding phase sets us (and our projects) up for success by whittling down the needs, behaviors, and attitudes of our target users until they’re practically formulaic.
This is where I take issue.
Empathy is not something to take lightly. What would you think if someone — a stranger, perhaps — said that they could understand your perspective, know what you’re thinking and feeling — because they once followed you through a grocery store and asked you a few probing questions?
To say that we can empathize with strangers through research — which often happen in the form of just a handful of short, potentially intrusive interactions — is presumptive and dangerous. While I fully recognize the value of learning about one’s target users, and the value of seeking and collecting input from people about experiential joys, pain points, and reimagined solutions, I think there’s too strong a tendency for designers to think that this constitutes Empathy with a capital E.
What do we even mean by empathy, anyway? Psychology Today says that empathy is “the experience of understanding another person’s condition from their perspective.” This, to me, is already impossible. I recognize that there are infinite perspectives, and that my views and experiences of navigating the world vastly differ from those of every other perspective, but I have yet to see the world from another person’s perspective, and I don’t expect to. To say that one can speak to another’s experience is oppressive.
The unbearably false lightness of empathy is further made real when we think about power differentials between designers and communities for whom they design. While not an industry requirement, designers are often in positions of social power and privilege over the folks for whom they (we) design. When such power differentials exist, the question of empathy is further heightened — how can, for example a person who has never experienced poverty understand the perspective of a person who has? How can a person with white privilege, or male privilege, or class privilege, understand the perspective of a person whose oppression from which they benefit?
What I seek is not an abolishment of the Empathy-Discovery-Understanding block; rather, it seems necessary to critically examine and reflect on our responsibility as designers in order to constantly challenge it. Just as we iterate our product and service designs, we must iterate our philosophies, methods, and strategies, too. Not only should we take the “Empathy” phase with a grain of salt, but before starting design projects, we should be asking ourselves (and one another) questions like:
What is the power and privilege I bring into this design team and this design project?
How might this affect the initial research process?
What assumptions do I consciously and subconsciously carry about the people about whom I am seeking to learn?
What might I be excluding?
How might the research process harm participants in ways I don’t yet recognize?
How might we take systems of privilege and oppression, and factors like institutionalized racism, colonialism, imperialism, and cultural hegemony into our design process?
As we work, live, learn, and grow within the ethos of Human-Centered Design, it’s imperative that we acknowledge the dynamics and forces of social constructs in the human experience. Otherwise, we are designing for human experience — an equitable one, perhaps — that is yet to be made real.
If there’s any perspective we can understand, it’s our own — and doing so requires critical self-reflection, and a willingness to acknowledge where we experience privilege and where we experience barriers. It’s hard, heavy, ongoing work — it’s one thing to probe others, it’s another to probe ourselves.
Surely, it’s not a single-step phase.
