Beyond empathy in design
We talk a great deal about empathy in design. It’s the first step in design thinking and the heart of human-centered design. Agencies love it, clients love it, designers love it. It’s a buzzword in every pitch deck and design interview.
But it often fails. Here’s the problem — the aura of empathy has eclipsed its efficacy in design practice.
What is empathy, exactly?
Researchers have identified two different kinds of empathy — cognitive empathy and affective empathy. Cognitive empathy is an exercise of the mind. It is defined as the ability to identify and understand how another person feels. Tools that designers may use to build cognitive empathy include:
- User journeys
- User interviews
- Empathy mapping
Affective (or emotional) empathy is sharing in the feelings of another person. It is, quite literally, heartfelt. Designers might cultivate affective empathy through:
- Experience prototyping
- Shadowing a user
The limits of empathy
Empathy can be a powerful tool for building products that are more humane, thoughtful, and useful, but it is not the be-all and end-all. Even in profound moments of empathy, it is not possible to understand the totality of the user’s experience. As the philosopher Alison Bailey reflects, “Imagining myself in the position of another at best gives me a second-hand comparative understanding of their suffering as something like my own.”
At worst, designers risk adopting a “design savior complex” — imposing design solutions on users based on a superficial understanding of lived experiences. While often fueled by good intentions, this ultimately marginalizes the user’s experience and excludes users from the design process.
There’s also the challenge of something called intergroup empathy bias. Research has shown that we are more likely to empathize with people who are similar to us. While this tribal mentality may have been useful for human evolution, it presents a significant design (and human) challenge in the modern day. As designers, it is our task to create for all sorts of people — some who are like us and many more who are not.
Intergroup empathy bias might be less of an issue if design teams were representative of many different identities and experiences. But data indicates that design has an inclusion problem. Per Google and AIGA’s 2019 design census, designers are overwhelmingly young, white, cisgendered, and heteronormative. While there are more female-identifying designers than ever, men still hold most leadership positions. (More thoughts on this in Design has an empathy problem: white men can’t design for everyone by Jesse Weaver.)
So where do we go from here?
Possibilities in human-centered design
There are many practical and imaginative tools to augment empathy in human-centered design. One such framework is intersectionality — a concept introduced by lawyer and scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in the 1980s. It is commonly defined as:
“The interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, and gender as they apply to a given individual or group, regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage.”
In recent years, design scholars like Sasha Costanza-Chock and Jacquie Shaw have examined how intersectionality can advance ethical design. Using this lens, both conclude that inclusion is a critical gap.
As Costanza-Chock notes:
“Design mediates so much of our realities and has tremendous impact on our lives, yet very few of us participate in design processes.”
Too many people are still marginalized in design (and — it goes without saying — in the world). It’s an uncomfortable truth. So, to be truly human centered, design must be inclusive. Otherwise, it is just design that centers certain, privileged humans. In practice, this might look like…
Building inclusive design teams
What problems are prioritized, what questions are asked, what solutions are envisioned… all of this depends on who participates in design processes and decisions. We all carry certain knowledge, experiences, and biases into our work. That is inevitable. What is not inevitable is a monotony of perspective in design. Reflect on your design team. Who is included? Who holds the positions of power? If we are to actualize truly human-centered design, we must build teams that value and empower designers of diverse genders, sexualities, races, ethnicities, religions, abilities, et al.
Prioritizing participatory design
Participatory design (also commonly called co-design) invites many different voices to participate in the design process in an effort to:
- Center the perspectives of people who are often marginalized
- Promote inclusive problem solving
- Build a more nuanced understanding of user needs
- Facilitate cross-functional collaboration within organizations
- Establish trust with users and internal stakeholders
- Create unique opportunities for innovation
- Get rapid, real-world validation of new ideas
- And more…
In participatory design, the designer must put their ego on the shelf. They are no longer the sole creative expert. Instead, they focus on:
- Witnessing the experiences, perspectives, and insights of the co-design team
- Facilitating creative ideation and design exploration
- Learning with and from the co-design team
- Translating ideas and prototypes into tangible designs
Advancing mentorship and education
True inclusion is not possible without equitable access to knowledge, networks, and opportunities. Designers with access to privilege and power and design organizations can help advance inclusion by contributing time, funds, or other resources to mentorship and education initiatives like Built By Girls, Girls Who Code, Out in Tech, and Where are the Black designers? (to name just a few).
* * * If this resonates with you, I encourage you to read Shaw’s research Toward an intersectional praxis in design and Costanza-Chock’s paper Design justice: Towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice, which examine intersectional design in greater depth.
Investing in human-centered practices
Empathy. Intersectionality. Participatory design. They are all lovely ideas, but they are just concepts without intentional action. I have found that a lot of organizations talk about human-centered practices, but few actually invest in them. In business terms, they are expensive. Human-centered design requires time, resources, and a great deal of intellectual and emotional labor. It’s much easier to talk about and around than to do.
Let’s use our dear friend empathy as an example. Many people assume that empathy is an inherent skill of all designers and, therefore, easy. This mythology is deeply problematic and detrimental to human-centered practice. To appropriately resource and plan for empathic design processes, we first must acknowledge that empathy is hard work. (Ergo, compassion fatigue.) In the real world, this equates to cost for organizations. I would argue that this expense is well worth it for the dividends of thoughtful product strategies and humane, effective user experiences. But it is an expense, nonetheless. The same logic holds true for inclusive hiring and participatory design practices.
There is a clear ethical imperative to advance human-centered practices. But is there a return on this investment? We live in a world ruled by money, money, money, so we must confront this question. There is research that points to the potential economic value of this ethic. For example, a study by PwC found that products designed with inclusion in mind had the potential to reach four times as many customers. The Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) also presents a compelling business case for accessibility, one facet of human-centered practices. The unfortunate reality is that most organizations do not prioritize inclusive, human-centered practices, which means that doing so presents a clear opportunity to differentiate against competition.
As with any other cost in life or business, human-centered practices may need to be rationalized to the powers that be and are best budgeted for in advance. Early (very early) in planning, ensure that your organization is aligned in prioritizing human-centered design and has allocated appropriate time, funds, and resources for it throughout the design life cycle. It may be one of the most important investments you make.
Learn more
Read Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock, Associate Professor of Civic Media at MIT
Listen to a talk on designing with intentional intersectionality by Jacquie Shaw
Read An intersectional approach to designing in the margins by Sheena Erete, Aarti Israni, and Tawanna Dillahunt
Learn more about hiring with intersectionality in mind from Edgardo Perez at Abstract
Discover talented designers via Blacks Who Design, Latinxs Who Design, Women Who Design, and Queer Design Club
Check out tools for co-design from Service Design Tools
