Technology without empathy creates two serious problems. One of them is products nobody wants. The other is a technology driven products which dehumanize us and instead of creating a better world lead to nightmare scenarios. Outside of the elite group of design-driven companies, such as Apple or IDEO, few tech companies fully understand the value of seeking inspiration directly from the user. Even fewer know how to actually conduct such a process. At the core of very successful revolutionary product, whether by design, intuition or chance there lies a deep insight into a latent human need. These meaningful needs so necessary to launching successful innovations, are in the words of Clayton Christensen at the Harvard Business School various “jobs-to-be-done” in the lives of real people. Each successful innovation must not only solve a real problem in the user’s life, but must also resonate with them in a way that respects their cultural values, in order to break through the inertia of habit. Creation of successful innovative products and services requires a creative awareness of users’ cognitive and affective mental models, translated into user-centered solutions.
One such path to user centered design is Empathic Design. The discovery of the “mirror neurons” in the early 1990s, by the neuroscientists Giacomo Rizzolatti and his colleagues at the University of Parma along with numerous other discoveries in brain science and child development suggest that humans are a fundamentally empathic species capable of reading other people mental states through mental mirroring. According to the influential economist, Jeremy Rifkin, the emergence of empathetic consciousness will be critical to the success and survival in the increasingly technologically augmented, human-made environment. The subject of Empathic Design was first addressed by Dorothy Leonard-Barton and Jeffrey F. Rayport in the article titled Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design in the Harvard Business Review. The article outlined a basic premise of applying empathy to pre-design research in order to uncover unarticulated user needs. Assisting clients in the environments predominantly driven by quantitative metrics, design practitioners have applied since 1990s, qualitative social research methods to successfully solve complex business and social challenges. User experience design pioneers, such as Patricia Moore, and Jane Fulton Suri with her colleagues at IDEO have been gaining their insights in a intuitive fashion through immersion in the user’s world. Patricia Moore used prosthetic disguise that aged her to more than 80 years of age to allow her to experience how elders manage their daily lives. Over the years these design practitioners have developed a number of such heuristic methods in order to go beyond purely cognitive understanding of the user’s needs. The leading practitioners of Human Centered Design, such as IDEO have added empathy as part of their integrated professional tool box to create compelling user experiences, which solved complex problems in the real-world context, in ways that were easy to understand and implement. Fulton Suri wrote in one of her articles on the subject that “Empathic design calls upon designers’ and researchers’ empathic abilities in making interpretations of what people think, feel and dream, and in envisioning possible future situations of product use”.
Empathic Design is still new and expanding multi disciplinary field, which holds great promise for solving, economic, social and technological challenges, by application of human-centered approaches to variety of complex global challenges. The discipline lies at the cross section of: design, Human Factors, Human Computer Interaction (HCI), software engineering, neuroscience, cognitive science, ethnography and experimental psychology. In a world constantly transformed by two major trends of our time: technology and globalization, proper understanding, classification and dissemination of the application of empathy as a strategic tool for innovation can bring the increased widespread new appreciation for the humanistic, social science based approaches to economic growth and solving of a variety business, educational and social problems. One of these benefits as Dev Patnaik suggests in Wired to Care, may be to encourage many traditionally quantitatively minded institutions to give permission to their staff to engage in more human-centered and contextual understanding of their stakeholders. Adoption of Empathic Design methods beyond the discipline of design, where it is not well understood, can lead to much improved rates of adoption and effectiveness of truly radical social and technological solutions, in both the developing as well as developed economies.
One of the most extensive examples of actual methods used in Empathic Design is IDEO Method Cards, created by IDEO’s human factors specialists and representing heuristic approaches derived from the firm’s extensive design practice. IDEO was also involved in the creation of Human-Centered Design Toolkit: An Open-Source Toolkit To Inspire New Solutions in the Developing World, a project funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and co-developed by IDEO, Heifer International and ICRW. The project was aimed at guiding innovation and design for people living for under $2/day.
This post has been of excellent support for me! Thanks for publishing it! Could you add me to your mailing checklist so I will be acknowledged of the most current news? My e-mail is Columbres466@hotmail.com !