Designing With Empathy

Through my workshop and design thinking activity for solving a problem which people dealing with I considered that me as a design thinker need to be more emphatic. I realized that Empathy can be a very significant factor in Human-Centered Design and Design Thinking.

Indeed, I found out that empathy is my capability or skill to observe the world through other user’s eyes, to observe what they can see, experience things as the people do, and feel what they feel. Being emphatic can help me to get as close as possible to individual’s feeling and put me aside from my biased or fixed ideas. It brings this opportunity for me to understand their thoughts, ideas, thoughts, and needs, and let me put myself in the shoes of users and customers.

According to IDEO, empathy refers to a Human-Centered Design Toolkit which is essential in design thinking process. Empathy helps me have a deeper understanding of user’s physical and emotional requirements, and the way they understand, see, feel, and cooperate with their surroundings. Additionally, it will help us to consider how all this has an effect on their lives basically.

After performing some problem-solving activities in design thinking workshop I recognized that in contrast to the traditional method of the marketing process, design thinking process needs to associate with emphatic research which is not just focused on facts about people, however, more about their thoughts and feelings.

Hence, during the design process, we can apply empathy in several ways. First of all, we can use it as a tool to design with, demanding the conversion of this emotional feeling or idea in an attribute and Then design thinker can use such empathy in order to gain vision into people’s needs and in undertaking so, enlighten the process of design (Gasparini, 2015).

Read more at:

Gasparini, A. (2015, February). Perspective and use of empathy in design thinking. In ACHI, The Eight International Conference on Advances in Computer-Human Interactions (pp. 49-54).