Empathy, or the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another, sounds like something that we as human beings do on a daily basis. Even though it’s not something that we think is really simple, because it really isn’t, we often try to utilize that ability in order to understand the feelings of others in a certain situation they’re going through. And in many ways, design thinking involves having empathy in order to understand the needs of the audience we’re adhering to.
In a video we watched that involves empathy, we got to see different people at a hospital and read into what they’re thinking as they are going through the hallways. More often than not, we see people thinking about the situation they’re about to go into and what’s happening to them, their family member or their friend that are going through a serious illness or had a rough injury. We then try to put ourselves in the position of those people and try to understand how that may affect us compared to how that may affect the people in the video. In way, we’re already empathizing with the people in a video and really design thinking goes beyond just current situations.
In a section of the Design Thinking Handbook that touched on empathy, the people they referred to, who were analyzing and exploring the situation at hand, were thinking about how this could affect them and what they can do to solve the problem. Now, for a lot of people, that sounds hard to do, especially since you have to understand how the people are facing the problem. However, it’s actually very simple and we don’t think that because we’re usually not used to trying to solve problems on our own, let alone know what the people around us are thinking in order to fully come to a conclusion on how we should even handle it. If not that, then just us not being able to answer it since we’re not the ones people go to in order to get answers on the problem at hand.
One person that put a good emphasis on empathy is Tim Brown, whom said “Empathy is at the heart of design. Without the understanding of what others see, feel, and experience, design is a pointless task.” And he’s very much right about empathy, if we can’t put ourselves in the shoes of out audience, then there’s no way we can create something that can perfectly help or entertain the audience we’re after. And in an exercise we did in class, we are actually tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the audience, that being the students at Quinnipiac and how they’re feeling towards the shuttle system and how it affects them on campus. And in the case of us, it worked and we came up with a lot of problems, solutions and so on about what we can do about it, mostly because we’ve experienced it ourselves and even the people who didn’t, they already know what think of. In a way, we were sort of “testing” our empathy to see how we can deal with a certain problem through understanding of emotions.
If it sounds like repetition at this point, that’s because empathy leads into the rest of design thinking without needing to do anything else than doing the definition of the word. And overall, the whole concept is simple and important component to doing anything ever.
Bryan's Graphic Journey 