My thoughts, questions, and concerns while reading “What Happened to Empathetic Design” (Mattelmaki, Vaajakallio & Koskinen, 2014).
General Thoughts:
- I find it interesting that research is moving in the direction of considering emotion in design. In my experience, specifically with the company I currently work for, we are actually moving away from the “gut feel” or emotional response planning that we’ve done in the past and focusing more on data and pure metrics to determine design methods.
- There seems to be significant ambiguity with designers trying to identify or relate to the ways or feelings of others. It seems like there is a cross between psychology and design, something I would have initially believed to be two very separate areas of expertise.
- This article left me with the impression that designers will have to be a “jack of all trades” in the future, they require collaboration skills, they need to be able to relate and understand the emotional needs of others, while still being an expert in instructional design.
- A moment where it “clicked” for me, was when the author described how the designer must become an empathetic designer of their own (aka they need to trigger that part of themselves while doing activities like the one we did with the gift giving), to help put into context what it means to tap into those feelings, and ultimately determine how to use that in a design form.
Questions/Concerns:
- If empathetic design is rooted in more face to face interactions, how can this live in an online world?
- How are user’s emotions or feelings interpreted through writing instead? Does this mean that you can only achieve empathetic design if you use technology that enables visual interactions between the designer/user?
- If you always do what the learner thinks they need or want, are you providing them a disservice if they “don’t know what they don’t know”?
Mattelmäki, T., Vaajakallio, K., & Koskinen, I. (2014). What happened to empathic design?. Design Issues, 30(1), 67-77
Emotion has always been an integral part of design. If not, what is the point? Design, like art, has as one of its most fundamental purposes the translation of a thought or emotion into something visual. I am a long-time graphic designer, and for a few years I used to teach part of one course lesson on understanding the emotion of the piece my students were trying to develop. Each component–from the whitespace to color palette to font choices–were chosen for what they contribute to the “feeling” of the piece or the story the piece was telling. I think that by discovering the link between psychology and design, you have taken a great leap forward 😉