“Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.”  Empathy is the second stage in the design process and a very important one that should not be skipped.  Empathy isn’t easy and can often be overlooked, it is truly essential to design. In order to create something impactful and truly meaningful, something that touches people, you must first take the time to connect with them.

To make these connections, you must first start by losing all judgment.  You cannot be empathetic if you go into a situation with judgments and constantly compare, you will never reach the stage of empathy.  To truly be empathetic you must be willing to open your heart and mind to others, ignoring judgment and pain, to say what you feel you need to say.

Also, a key point to remember is that empathy is not sympathy, in fact, it is the opposite.  “Empathy fuels connection, sympathy drives disconnection.”  “Empathy is feeling with people.” It involves recognizing emotion in people and communicating that, while sympathy is just a feeling of pity or sorrow towards another’s misfortune.

In order to be empathetic, you must become an active listener.  Acknowledge the speaker and let them know they are being heard. You must also recognize the unspoken, such as eyes and facial expressions, also known as body language.  By paying attention to others you can better suit their wants and needs by shifting yourself or ideas to fit.

To relate this to design, in the empathy stage of the design process, you acquire information by qualitative and quantitative data collection.  The purpose of which is to identify feelings and needs, along with problems and pain points. To collect this, you can use research, interviews, surveys, shadowing, documentaries, journals, and body language.  You must utilize your empathy skills in every aspect of this data collection, in order to receive the most useful and accurate results.

A perfect example of how empathy has been used in the design world is with the creation of Embrace.  “Worldwide, about 15 million premature babies are born every year and the most common preventable cause of infant mortality is hypothermia.”  A team of designers was tasked to solve this problem.  Originally, they came up with the idea to create cheaper incubators, assuming money was the problem.  Although, after making a trip to a hospital in Nepal, they realized the incubators were not even being used.  The families lived too far away and could not make it to a hospital in time. Using this information, the designers then were able to create Embrace, a portable incubator that can be used in the homes, for these families with newborns.  

Without the design team expressing empathy and visiting the area, interviewing the people, and taking the time to put themselves in their shoes, Embrace would have never come to fruition.  They would have, most likely, stuck with their original plan of cheaper incubators, which would have completely missed the mark as a solution to the problem.

Empathy may seem like an extremely challenging task, and it is, but you can improve your empathy skills through simple steps in your daily life.  Some healthy habits of empathetic people include:  cultivating curiosity about strangers, challenging prejudices and discovering commonalities, trying another person’s life, listening hard and opening up,  inspiring mass action and social change, and developing an ambitious imagination.

Empathy is at our core.  As humans, we have naturally evolved to care for each other.  All of us can cultivate empathy as a habit, which will improve not only the quality of our lives but as well as the lives around us.

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q654-kmF3Pc&ab_channel=MindfulMarks

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Evwgu369Jw&t=1s&ab_channel=RSA

https://www.designbetter.co/design-thinking/empathize

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/topic/empathy/definition

https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/six_habits_of_highly_empathic_people1