{"id":678,"date":"2018-11-17T15:59:29","date_gmt":"2018-11-17T23:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/?p=678"},"modified":"2018-11-25T12:49:13","modified_gmt":"2018-11-25T20:49:13","slug":"a1-empathy-and-design","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/a1-empathy-and-design\/","title":{"rendered":"A1: Empathy and Design"},"content":{"rendered":"

Going through the d.school Design Process, reading the Mattelmaki et al. (2014) article and discussing it with my husband, I had the following thoughts on empathic design, empathy in the design process and its relation to my current work in teaching and web.<\/em><\/p>\n

Our ability to share the feelings of other humans, to put ourselves in their shoes and see the world from their perspective, is a cornerstone of a community, teaching or building anything new in today\u2019s world. But in my professional experience, this sometimes ends up being an unconscious projection of our own experiences and biases onto other people.\u00a0Empathy is the mid-point on a continuum of automatic emotional response: quick, intuitive, easily manipulated, and often misleading.<\/p>\n

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With empathy in the driver\u2019s seat, we literally put ourselves in someone else\u2019s shoes, and during this, we are not basing our actions on their experiences but instead projecting ourselves onto them by figuratively asking ourselves what we would want if we were in that situation. But unless we are, or have been, in the same situation with the same prior experiences, our automatic emotional response can mislead us resulting in solutions that work counter to our intentions. We need to use our automatic emotional responses wisely and make ourselves aware of when we are projecting our own experiences onto others so that we can focus on their experiences rather than our own.<\/p>\n

Our empathy is rooted in our life experiences and social and emotional biases. In his\u00a0Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/a><\/u> book, Daniel Kahneman (2011) explains how our thought processes are split into System 1: fast, reactive, emotional, and System 2: slow, reflective, logical. He also describes how factors such as bias, availability, proximity, that power System 1 often mislead us. Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion fit under System 1 and are likely to all these errors.<\/p>\n

We make decisions as a designer (any kind) based on years of experience what has shaped our biases toward our preferences, but our audience does not see the world through our eyes. Thus, we should move our thought process from the emotional and reactive System 1 to the reflective System 2, and we can take a critical look and design in a balanced way and can create better designs by truly placing the people we communicate with at the center of our process.<\/p>\n

How do you feel about the Design Challenge?<\/p>\n

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Illustrations are created by the author.<\/em><\/p>\n

References<\/p>\n

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow<\/em> (Kindle). Farrar, Straus and Giroux.<\/p>\n

Mattelm\u00e4ki, T., Vaajakallio, K., & Koskinen, I. (2014). What Happened to Empathic Design? Design Issues<\/em>, 30<\/em>(1), 67\u201377. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1162\/DESI_a_00249<\/p>\n

Schairer, S. (n.d.). Empathy vs Sympathy vs Compassion | The Chopra Center. Retrieved November 17, 2018, from https:\/\/chopra.com\/articles\/whats-the-difference-between-empathy-sympathy-and-compassion<\/p>\n

Stanford University Institute of Design. (2016). A Virtual Crash Course in Design Thinking \u2014 Stanford d.school. Retrieved November 12, 2018, from https:\/\/dschool.stanford.edu\/resources-collections\/a-virtual-crash-course-in-design-thinking<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Going through the d.school Design Process, reading the Mattelmaki et al. (2014) article and discussing it with my husband, I had the following thoughts on empathic design, empathy in the design process and its relation to my current work in teaching and web. Our ability to share the feelings of other humans, to put ourselves […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":685,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-678","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lrnt524"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=678"}],"version-history":[{"count":24,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":714,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/678\/revisions\/714"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/685"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=678"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=678"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/malat-webspace.royalroads.ca\/rru0057\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=678"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}