Make Empathy Work
Highlights from the Compassion Summit with Dalai Lama 2/3
This is a three-series reflection on our participation in the Compassion Summit with Dalai Lama. The first piece talked about the Dalai Lama’s conversation with the group and ritual design session for compassion. In this second post, We’d like to briefly talk about 4 highlights from the many intriguing talks and hands-on sessions. We picked these because they made us curious and inspired. They nudged us as designers towards action.
Before getting into the sessions, here’s a little background on the summit. Summit was co-chaired by Elif Gokcigdem, Author and Founder of Empathy-Building Through Museums Initiative, Jon Kolkin, of Kolkin Fine Arts Photography, and the Office of Tibet. Elif Gokcigdem was also the creative content and experience designer behind the Summit agenda. The summit brought 30 thought leaders and practitioners from the museum and creative industries. From a NASA Science Center CEO to artificial intelligence artists, organizer Elif Gokcigdem wanted to provide a platform for cross-pollination and creative conversations. These four in a way manifest that intention.
Three-Kinds-of-Empathy Exercise
Tom Rockwell, creative director at the SF’s Exploratorium, led an intriguing empathy session. We were asked to pick three images — from popular magazine pages that we felt empathy towards. There were three categories:
- Easy empathy: where you naturally inclined to feel empathy. For instance, when you see a baby or an animal.
- Neutral empathy: where you neither feel easy nor hard. For instance, when you see a worker at a factory.
- Challenging empathy: Where you need extra effort to feel empathy. Images that participants selected were showing both commonalities and differences across participants. For instance, a politician who is well-known for cruel policies.
A couple of key takeaways from this exercise:
- Empathy building requires an effort. As Dalai Lama mentioned in his talk, it is hard work to be good.
- Images are tools to amplify or diminish empathy.
- In that sense, images are political and need to be curated/designed with ethics and values.
He also talked about their journey creating the Sciences of Sharing exhibition at San Francisco’s Exploratorium. Two key takeaways from his Sciences of the Sharing reflection.
- Social interactions can be studied and represented in experimental ways.
- In order to tell the story of a concept like sharing, you need the relatively opposite concept — competition. This also reminds us of the understanding that things live with their opposites.
Decentralized Stories for Compassionate technologies
Amelia Winger-Bearskin, an AI artist/technologist from NY, shared the beautiful story of the Corn Husk Woman from her native tradition (Seneca-Cayuga, Haudenosaunee) and talked about the power of decentralized stories. According to her Medium post,
I approach decentralized storytelling in a Haudenosaunee way: Our current world is the result of seven generations before me. I am interacting with the world designed by my ancestors and yours. My life is a way to communicate with the people born in the future seven generations from now.
This kind of framing made us realize how strong the stories can be in shaping our life trajectories. Stories need to be told in many different channels in order to successfully diffuse into everyday life. In a way, as designers, we are storytellers, we tell stories through artifacts and experiences. Artifacts in return become stories that get interpreted in many ways with people.
Empathy through Constructed Stories
Karlen Gardner from MIA shared their work on empathy building through fictive interpretation of the artwork. One of these activities called Empathy Constructed Through Stories. In this activity, participants are asked to select an artwork and construct a story around that artwork without knowing its backstory(like the one above.) Then they share, unpack the constructed stories. Through this personal/social interpretation journey, they discuss and reflect the impact of these stories. We found this a practical method to bring empathy and empathetic understanding into different settings, from design workshops to classrooms to museums.
A Dialog in the Dark
Speaking of empathy, Dialog in the Dark is a crystallized example of an exhibition that’s designed for empathy building. Orna Cohen and Andres Heinecke briefly shared their story and the concept behind Dialog in the Dark. The exhibition as the name implies happens in the dark. The only way you can explore the dark space is your other senses, other people in the room, and guides. Through scent, sound and haptic modalities, people go through a unique journey.
The dialogue in the Dark works at two layers, first, it helps exhibition participants become aware of the other, and for people who are referred to as “disabled.” Secondly, it reverses the roles. During the exhibition experience, participants are guided by the blind or visually impaired people. We found this reversing-role aspect a transformative learning experience. Looking forward to visiting one of their thirty-six locations in the future.
To recap, Three-kinds-of-empathy, Decentralized storytelling, Constructed Stories, and the Dialog in the Dark provide glimpses of how practitioners in museum and art industries articulate empathy, and empathy building. These could be inspiring for designers, especially those who work in the behavior change and social design space. When you make empathy work, the possibility of compassion and compassionate behavior emerge. Our other key takeaway is the power of stories and experiential learning in empathy building.
In the following and final post, we will share our visual inspirations from the visit to Delhi and Dharamshala, Stay tuned.
