EMPATHY ON THE EDGE
EMPATHYON THE EDGESCALING AND SUSTAINING A HUMAN-CENTERED APPROACHIN THE EVOLVING PRACTICE OF DESIGNBy Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard, IDEORemarkable things can happen when empathy for others playsa key role in problem-solving. In today’s global marketplace,companies are being asked to design for increasingly diverseusers, cultures, and environments. These design challengescan be so systemic and wickedly complex, the task of aligningall of a project’s stakeholders can seem impossible. But it’s not.Design empathy is an approach that draws upon people’sreal-world experiences to address modern challenges. Whencompanies allow a deep emotional understanding of people’sneeds to inspire them—and transform their work, their teams,and even their organization at large—they unlock the creativecapacity for innovation.In this essay, we’ll explore how design empathy works, its valueto businesses, and some ways in which it can be used to effectpositive change. We’ll discuss the need for scaling and sustainingdesign empathy, so that its benefits can reach more people andhave long-term positive impact throughout organizations. Andwe’ll offer stories from the edges of our own empathic designpractice. Our goal is to inspire other designers and innovatorsto share their practices and to expand the conversation aboutempathy to include the business community-at-large.EMPATHY ON THE EDGEp. 1
Design Empathy: An IntroductionThe definition of empathy is the ability to be awareof, understanding of, and sensitive to anotherperson’s feelings and thoughts without having hadthe same experience. As human-centered designers,we consciously work to understand the experienceof our clients and their customers. These insightsinform and inspire our designs. IDEO CEO TimBrown describes design empathy as a mental habit(Brown, 2009). It is also a fundamental culturalvalue that allows our designers to develop concepts, products, services, strategies, and systemsthat are both innovative and responsive to actualuser needs and desires (Black, 1998).When empathic design first appeared in businessliterature in the late 1990s, it was described asa cultural shift. Researchers in various disciplineshailed the importance of emotion as not onlya valid subject of study, but as one that was crucialto design research (Dandavate et al., 1996).Empathic design was presented as a process thatinvolved observation, data collection and analysis,and iterative prototyping. Most significantly, thediscipline was identified as a way to uncoverpeople’s unspoken latent needs and then addressthem through design (Leonard and Rayport, 1997).By responding to real, but unexpressed andunmet needs, design empathy promised to bringfinancial reward.Learning from FishermenBack in the 1970s, a young industrial designernamed John Stoddard joined Moggridge Associatesin London. His first assignment was to redesignmarine radios and on his first day—which hedescribes as a “wonderful shock”—he was sent tothe fishing towns of Hull and Grimsby on England’snortheastern coast. Stoddard’s task was to meetwith fishermen on their boats to get a real understanding of how they used radios. He returnedto the studio a firm believer in the value ofobserving people and their context as part ofthe design process.This approach, which cofounder Bill Moggridgebrought to IDEO, provided the early foundation forour human-centered design practice. Since then,the scope of our work—once focused primarily onEMPATHY ON THE EDGEproduct design—has expanded to include digitalinnovation, organizational strategy, and globalbusiness challenges. We’ve learned that tacklingthese issues as if they were design problems, eventhough they are outside the traditional realm ofdesign, leads to outcomes that are functional andemotionally meaningful for the people affected.Empathic design has proven useful in addressingincreasingly large systemic challenges, such aseducation, healthcare, and organizational efficiency(Brown, 2009). This has inspired us to find waysto apply empathy in new contexts.Designing for Increasingly Complex SystemsSome of those contexts have arisen from shiftsin how people relate to one another and the world.Advances in information and communicationtechnologies alter how we work, play, learn,socialize, and express ourselves. Consumers’ relationships with, and expectations of, companies arechanging as well. Businesses worldwide are beingheld increasingly accountable for their long-termsocial and environmental impacts. This is drivingmany firms to adopt new policies and practicesaround energy conservation, sourcing, production,and sustainability. Products and services werenever designed in a vacuum, but now everythingis more evidently connected as part of a largerecosystem. To succeed today, an ever-greaternumber of stakeholders must be considered duringthe design process.BY RESPONDING TO REAL,BUT UNEXPRESSED AND UNMETNEEDS, DESIGN EMPATHYPROMISED TO BRING FINANCIALREWARD.We, as designers, have also changed how we thinkof success and impact. Success is not judged solelywithin the span of a project or product launch.The impact of design work must have staying powerfar beyond its final presentation, implementation,and market adoption. Talking with a few fishermento discover what’s needed in a product is no longerenough. Design empathy must expand to suppliers,p. 2
buyers, and customers—the whole ecosystem ofpeople and businesses involved. We see this firsthand at IDEO, and we suspect other designers areseeing it, too. In all this complexity, we believe thatcontinuing to evolve how we practice empathy willbe key to increasing the positive impact of design.HOW EMPATHY WORKS IN DESIGNEmpathy is a powerful force. Research showsthat when we are empathetic, we enhance ourability to receive and process information. Puttingourselves in someone else’s shoes—a part of oursubconscious behavior—causes measurable changesin our cognitive style, increasing our so-calledfield-dependent thinking. This type of thinking helpsus put information in context and pick up contextualcues from the environment, which is essential whenwe’re seeking to understand how things relate toone another, literally and figuratively. Research alsoshows that we are more helpful and generousafter an empathic encounter (Decety and Ickes,2011). Taken together, this empathetic behaviorpersonally motivates us to solve design challenges.Although empathy appears to be an innate ability,and men and women (on average) recognizeother people’s emotions with equal accuracy,not everyone applies the approach in a workcontext. Empathy in design requires deliberatepractice. We must intentionally seek opportunitiesto connect with people in meaningful ways andto set aside reactions and behaviors that willinterfere with it. And, once empathy is achieved,it needs to be moderated: apply too much andour thinking loses focus; apply too little andthe depth of our insight suffers.The mechanisms for empathy in the brain arechemical and neurological. Zak (2012) has correlated feelings of empathy directly to the balance ofthe levels of oxytocin (the “cuddle hormone”) andcortisol (the “stress hormone”) in the bloodstream.When people witness trustworthy actions, theirbodies respond with increased levels of oxytocin,creating feelings of trust and empathy.Another study shows that empathic and analyticalthinking are rival networks in the brain: the analytical network makes judgments independent ofEMPATHY ON THE EDGEemotions, while the empathic network trustsblindly, at face value (Jack et al., 2012). What’smore, when one network is “on,” the other becomessuppressed. Knowing that, it’s important to pointout that empathic design is not about beingemotional all of the time. It’s about creating abalance between empathizing with an experienceand analyzing its nature and components. Managingthis in the design process is an ongoing andexhausting, but highly rewarding collective effort.PUTTING DESIGN EMPATHY INTO PRACTICEA design environment that’s built around trustwill promote empathy, but designers also need tobuild self-awareness about the mode they areoperating in, and to develop a mental habit ofswitching modes: To think and feel, rigorouslyand deeply.Having some degree of compassion for othersisn’t difficult for most people. However, some ofthe qualities and behaviors that can make a personsuccessful in business can stand in the way ofachieving empathy. People who cannot temporarilylet go of their role or status or set aside their ownexpertise or opinion will fail to empathize withothers who have conflicting thoughts, experiences,or mental models.PEOPLE WHO CANNOTTEMPORARILY LET GO OFTHEIR ROLE OR STATUS ORSET ASIDE THEIR OWNEXPERTISE OR OPINION WILLFAIL TO EMPATHIZE WITHOTHERS WHO HAVECONFLICTING THOUGHTS,EXPERIENCES, OR MENTALMODELS.Empathic design also may be hindered by an unsympathetic culture within the larger organization.Management may lose touch with what customersand users are experiencing as its attention getsp. 3
Figure 1. Clients join designers on a road trip to actively experience aspects of California’s car culture firsthand.Photo courtesy of IDEO.drawn toward solving legal hurdles, reacting tocompetitive pressure, and overcoming technologicalobstacles – the stress of running a business caneasily suppress a desire for design empathy.As IDEO’s David and Tom Kelley describe, manyfears keep people from trying to go out andsolve real problems (Kelley, 2012). Empathy is acounterforce to those fears: regaining perspectiveon what customers want and really care aboutcan fundamentally change a business by presenting new opportunities and giving it a means toaddress them.It’s possible to fuel empathy, or pivotal “out of ego”experiences, without a lot of effort. For example,imagine being asked to come up with a long-termvision for a brand of toys. Perhaps you’ve conducted lots of market research, but the analyses do notpoint you in any clear direction, nor connect youto the mindset of children. To kindle that sense ofexcitement and inspiration, you might simply geton the floor for a play-along with youngsters in thetarget age range, or arrange a toy-hacking party ata local school.EMPATHY ON THE EDGESometimes it’s worth going the extra mile todevelop emotional resonance with people we’redesigning for. We have had teams do things like: ›› Shadow sales representatives and bank tellers onthe job to understand their needs and challenges›› Sleep on rubber sheets overnight at an elder-carefacility to relate to spending one’s last months oryears there›› Participate in grueling endurance events to shareathletes’ exhilaration and pain›› Take an RV road trip through California toexperience car cultureSeek Those Who Live on the EdgeIn our fieldwork we look for diverse people andsituations to promote empathy, which we internallyrefer to as “extremes.” These mostly ordinarypeople with extreme points of view—owing to theirpersonality, circumstances, or culture—provide abroad range of experiences and well-developedperspectives that would be harder to identify ifwe looked at a random sample of individuals representing a range of the target demographics.p. 4
“The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed,” as science-fiction novelist William Gibsonis said to have observed. In order to innovate, weneed to understand the intriguing, exciting, andlesser-known fringes of society, where the future isalready at play. Why? Because the extremes promptus to discover new meanings and interpretationsfor old things (Pantzar, 1997), which can help usdetermine how best to incorporate the latest technologies and use practices into our work.And when designers cannot actively participate inan experience, it’s useful to find analogies to provide relevant insight. For a project related to woundcare, after observing nurses changing dressings forlarge, hard-to-heal wounds we wanted to empathizemore deeply with the patients. To better experiencethe fear of anticipated discomfort at the hands ofa professional, one designer elected to have hischest hair waxed off. Research can be as creative anendeavor as the rest of the design process!However we choose to gain empathy, it can helpus to focus, prioritize, and defend our design decisions—all of which is necessary in the ever-evolvingbusiness of design innovation. Empathy also motivates design teams to keep going and providesenergy to overcome the inevitable obstacles tobringing new offerings to life.DESIGN EMPATHY IN ACTION:CREATING A SENSE OF PURPOSEDanone is a multinational business that makes dairyproducts, bottled water, and other foods. In 1996,when the company partnered with the GrameenFoundation to open a yogurt manufacturing plantin the Bogra District of Bangladesh, no one knewhow significant the small social business—designedto benefit families—would become for everyoneinvolved. Since then, the partnership “has transformed Danone culturally,” says Danone projectmanager Marie Soubeiran (Bennett, 2012).Figure 2. A designer gets his chest waxed to empathize with wound-care patients. Photo courtesy of IDEO.EMPATHY ON THE EDGEp. 5
At first, the effort focused on technical challengesin manufacturing design, milk sourcing, and formulation (Kiviat, 2010). Today, the plant operates ona community scale, using local milk to make aspecial nutrient-rich yogurt to help supplementBangladeshi children’s dietary deficiencies.Employees throughout the company take pridein the company’s positive impact on other people’slives, hanging pictures of the villagers in officesthroughout Danone, Soubeiran says. The company’sempathy for consumers of its product—evident inits focus on their actual needs and its desire toempower them to help themselves—gives Danonea sense of purpose and direction, and spursinnovation elsewhere in the organization. Creativesolutions developed at the factory (such as usingenzymes to keep unrefrigerated milk fresh longer)have huge potential in other markets.Encouraging this kind of inclusive championshipis what we mean by “empathy on the edge,” andit requires addressing two related challenges:1. Scaling. We need to involve greater numbersof people, in greater diversity, in “out of ego”experiences. More people need to connectwith and care about others and work to makedesirable changes happen.2. Sustaining. We want to cultivate active, persistent “out of ego-ness” in organizations, bringingabout a pervasive attitude and habitual awarenessof the people who are affected by our decisions,beyond the life span of a specific project.Danone’s experience echoes a phenomenon we’reseeing across industries. When a whole companyexpresses true empathy for its customers, employees enjoy a sense of clarity and purpose—andthey do better work. As designers, we find thatempathy helps businesses create and measuresuccess in new ways. After all, the broadestdefinition of design is that it transforms currentsituations into preferred ones (Simon, 1996).When these preferred situations align with thegoals of multiple stakeholders, everyone benefits.This is the promise of human-centered andempathic design.WHAT’S NEXT: EVOLVING DESIGN EMPATHYAs we see with Danone, to be most effective, empathy cannot remain the privilege of an individual,a design team, or even a tight group of highlyinvolved stakeholders. Nor can it endure only forthe course of a project. If design empathy is tosustain impact throughout an organization, it needsongoing support from the overarching culture.An empathic attitude needs to be championed,nurtured, and practiced regularly. People withinthe organization must learn to tell stories froman empathic point of view and to ask for empathywhen it’s missing. Projects need understanding,enthusiastic champions who will tell and retellstories that keep empathy alive.EMPATHY ON THE EDGEFigure 3. To understand more about how the villagers makechoices while shopping, the design team selected this range ofproducts to display for sale at a village market in Ghana. Photocourtesy of IDEO.p. 6
Figure 4. The client team’s journey, including a trip to a local pharmacy with herbal medicine infusers, began toreveal dissonance between their concept for contraceptive pills and traditions of health and medicine in China.Photo courtesy of IDEO.Here we’ll look at both edges—scaling and sustaining—by offering examples of how we’ve addressedeach one in recent design challenges. Althoughadmittedly imperfect, our experiments are intendedto inspire others to create better ways of fosteringdesign empathy broadly among individuals, teams,and organizations.in the United States had to be replaced with activities that made sense for consumers in Ghana (Sklar& Madsen, 2010). The designers set up a stall tosell items at a community market, engaging ruralvillagers who came into town to shop and learningdirectly how they made their purchase decisionsin the moment.SCALING DESIGN EMPATHYHow do we scale empathy from one individual orteam to a whole organization?Second, we need to help larger, more diversegroups of people—entire teams, departments,and companies—have “out of ego” experiences.This also requires broadening the range of ourresearch methods and techniques – one-on-oneethnographies in homes aren’t always the bestway for facilitating empathic connections forlarge groups of people.First, we are challenged to empathize with morediverse groups of stakeholders. In complex systemicchallenges, there exist a multitude of actors, whether users or others, whose roles, needs, attitudes,abilities, and expectations influence the designrequirements in some crucial way. Some complexdesign challenges involve people of differentcultures, languages, and societies where traditionalresearch approaches won’t help us adequatelyempathize with their experiences.For example, research tools that worked to helpdesign teams understand financial decision-makingEMPATHY ON THE EDGEHere are some of IDEO’s recent experimentalapproaches to scaling empathy. Although theseexamples are drawn from our health-care projects,the learnings can be applied across industries.Progressive DiscoveryIt can be difficult to empathise with people whoseculture and values are fundamentally different.p. 7
In those situations, we need to craft a progressivejourney of empathy and learning. In one case, anAmerican company asked us to conduct researchon urban Chinese women’s attitudes about contra-taboo sex is in China and how the culture affectswomen and their birth-control choices.On the second and third days, we took the clientsto interview abortion doctors at hospitals, to speakwith pharmacists, and even to visit a Shanghai lovehotel that rents rooms in three-hour increments.By the fourth day, the clients were ready to acceptthe realities of a society in which cultural normsare stacked against prophylactic pills—and begin torethink the design of their offering accordingly.Analogous ExperiencesWhen it isn’t feasible to bring clients face-to-facewith users in context, we can create analogousexperiences to foster empathy. Analogous experiences help organizations see familiar ways ofworking with fresh eyes. IDEO sometimes putsclients through carefully crafted “feels like”situations to help them draw parallels betweentheir own experiences and those of their customers.Designing analogous experiences often gives usmore latitude and makes it easier to involve largergroups in the design empathy process, withoutsacrificing any of the emotional impact moretraditional observations would provide. In fact,because they tend to require some effort on theclients’ part to engage, analogous experiencescan have even more transformative power thanthe passive observation of users’ actual activities.Figure 5. What if the hospital were a restaurant?Clients learn how their patients feel by partaking in ananalogous dining experience, involving paper slippersand big bibs. Photo courtesy of IDEO.ception. When our
EMPATHY ON THE EDGE SCALING AND SUSTAINING A HUMAN-CENTERED APPROACH IN THE EVOLVING PRACTICE OF DESIGN By Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard, IDEO Remarkable things can happen when empathy for others plays a key role in problem-solving. In today’s global marketplace,
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Empathy is the competitive edge leaders are missing, states the Businessolver 2019 study. According to The Empathy Business empathy is positively correlated with growth, productivity, and earnings. The Index also makes a case for empathy boosting the bottom line as the top 10 most empathetic companies generated 50% more earnings
