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Design and non-violent communication: how to listen

What if designers used non-violent communication tools to focus more on how to listen, empathise, and understand. Would that help when researching, designing, pitching, and presenting?

Sanna Rau
UX Collective
7 min readJan 24, 2023
steampunk device attached to a human ear
Listening is difficult, given that humans have an average eight-second attention span.

Listening before speaking

We were at a restaurant, booked only for us that night. There were four or five long tables, a dinner party organised by a business association I’m a member of. I was looking to the left, to the right and straight ahead. Everyone around me met my glance with pain and suffering in their eyes. We all looked down at our half-empty dinner plates. I shivered.

It wasn’t the food, the company or the setting that caused the pain, it was the speaker. Maybe you’ve been there at a meeting, a conference or possibly a wedding, and the speaker is not tuned in to the audience. The speaker does not know what the audience wants or needs to hear.

Maybe you recognise inappropriate jokes or get a topic explained to you as if you had no idea, even though you’re an expert. Or maybe no one has any idea what the speaker is on about. Other times it might be a very one-sided conversation where you don’t get a chance to open your mouth. You know it if you’ve been…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Sanna Rau

Work with, and write about design, sustainability, equality and the world. Based in Aotearoa NZ.

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