As an interaction designer, not only they are trained to be good listeners when it comes to interviewing their users, but also they are required to have keen observation skills to test their products by the users. Therefore, there is a set of techniques called empathic design that can help designers and researchers to achieve their goals. At the end of the 1990s, new types of challenges have emerged for designers and researchers – design solutions were not just problem-solving engagement, rather, practitioners wanted to understand the nature of the problem that is driven by an individual’s every life experiences: their desire, emotions, and moods. Thus, empathic design is rooted in most of nowadays design practices.
Unlike other traditional research methods, empathic design is thoroughly interpretive – observing, learning, analyzing, and applying the information gathered from observations. These crucial observations achieve high ecological validity by conducting the experiment in the user’s own environment and learning the user’s unarticulated needs under their everyday routines. Since a customer’s experience and feedback can be limited at times and such a design method enables designers to identify user’s needs when customers themselves might not recognize.
Citation
Mattelmäki, Tuuli, et al. “What Happened to Empathic Design?” Design Issues, vol. 30, no. 1, 2014, pp. 67–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24267026. Accessed 16 Sept. 2020.
Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport. “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design.” Harvard Business Review, 1 Aug. 2014, hbr.org/1997/11/spark-innovation-through-empathic-design.
“Empathic Design.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 4 Mar. 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathic_design.
Elmansy, Rafiq. “Empathic Design: The Most Difficult Simple Approach to Successful Design.” Designorate, 7 Apr. 2016, www.designorate.com/empathic-design-approach-to-successful-design/.
Thomas, Joyce, and Deana McDonagh. “Empathic Design: Research Strategies.” The Australasian Medical Journal, Australasian Medical Journal, 2013, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3575059/.
Hi Ted,
I really appreciate your piece on empathy! Oftentimes, I feel discouraged in what sometimes feels like a dog-eat-dog world, to create the next big thing, find success, and especially in the exploitation in subordinate workers. But I think that approaching the ability to anticipate others needs as a strength in observation brings me pride as a designer.
Thank you for sharing!
I agree with your bibliography that modern designs involve lots of emotions and moods of the problem. Empathy could improve the understanding of every detail of the experience and problem.