2. The Empathy Boogie

How Designers Learn to Understand Themselves In Order To Understand Others

Great dancers look as if they’re moving effortlessly. Their synchronized movements look choreographed. They spin and dip with ease.

That level of expertise requires practice, timing, and great communication. Dancers also have to be aware of their bodies and environment. For these reasons, dance is like empathy.

Empathy is when you can put yourself in someone else’s shoes in order to see how they might be experience the world.

We learn empathy through our family, friends, media, and culture. This practice is one that changes throughout our lives and requires constant practice.

Empathy and Design

Empathy is prerequisite for Design Thinking. Design Thinking relies on Designers to engage with the people they’re designing for in order to make something that best meets the needs of the client.

At its best, empathy removes the ego and assumptions from Designers and creates space for the participants they’re serving. At its worst, empathy is misunderstood as interrogation. Participant opinions are left unobserved and the design fails to meet their needs.

To make empathy work in Design, Designers have to practice empathy. At minimum, this requires three things: a) to be self aware, b) to ask questions, and c) practice self care.

Self Awareness

Practicing self-awareness can be uncomfortable. It might mean you realize you’re taller than the average height. Or that you overdressed for an occasion. It might mean that you recognize your power over someone else. Or that you have different privileges from another person. Those details might be uncomfortable sometimes, but they are critical for open lines of communication and empathy.

As a Designer, you have to remove your own ego in order understand the client’s needs. Your job is make something for them. In order to understand where your client is coming from, you need to be able to see the world as they do.

Ask Questions

Seeing the world from someone else’s shoes requires listening. Literally, hearing. But that’s not all. We must also pay attention to how they’re talking, how they’re dressed, their body language, and their attitude. This information provides context to the words that are beings said.

These small observations guide every interaction. During an interview or brainstorming session, observations help Designers to ask questions instead of make assumptions.

Making assumptions assumes you know the right answer. Asking questions helps you understand what someone else knows. If you’re designing for someone else, its critical to understand what they know.

Asking questions can help reveal subconscious idea that clients aren’t even aware of. This establishes trust in the Design team and makes a better overall process.

Self Care

I rarely go a day without hearing someone describing their behaviors as self care. Sometimes this is a thinly disguised justification for their actions. Other times, self care is a careful attempt at self preservation. True self care is about finding balance in your life to rest, grow, and meaningfully live.

In Design practice, this self care is necessary to recover from empathy.

Empathy is work. You peer into other people’s lives. It is exhausting to see the world from such radically different points of view. Sometimes these lives can appear more successful or adventurous than our own.

This mental trap is hard to break free from. If you find yourself comparing instead of empathizing, how might you feel empathy for yourself in this situation?

A Model Relationship

Self care isn’t something taught in school, but is is critical to your practice. Empathy is the mechanism by which we refine our own understandings of the world, and make space for other understandings to exist. Designers have the responsibility to steward empathy in their projects and teams to best represent user needs.

Consider your own life. Who is the person you call when you’re having a bad day? That someone is empathizing with you? How does it make you feel knowing that they can see where you’re coming from? That feeling of trust is the model of what an ideal relationship between stakeholders and designers should be. How can you bring that into your own projects?

This article is part of a series: How Do We Get There From Here? Each essay explores a component of Design and how it shapes our practices. You can find the full series and related content at How Might We…, ongoing thoughts from my Graduate work at Carnegie Mellon’s School of Design.