For designers, empathy is one of the most important concepts we need to learn. Most designers
have heard that empathy is a core design competency, but we haven't necessarily inquired
about why it's so important.
I'm a graduate student in California College of the Arts' Master of Interaction Design (MDes)
program, and a few weeks ago my thinking on empathy was challenged in the IxD Foundations
course. As part of an an assignment called "Studio Leadership," a classmate and I were
charged with designing and presenting an hour-long teaching session. As student leaders, we
had to facilitate learning an interaction concept and applying one studio principle to create an
Since we are learning about empathy in all of our classes we needed to find a new angle for this
subject. We looked everywhere and considered everything, and reviewed the books and articles
that we'd read about empathy. My first exposure to empathy in a design education setting was
in our Communication by Design class reading Connecting Across Differences by Jane Marantz
Connor and Dian Killian. The authors introduce their discussion of empathy with a quote from
Jeremy Rifkin, "Much of our daily..." Rifkins words resonated with me, and assured me that I
was very familiar with empathy, even though I hadn't defined it as a professional competency.
I've always been a very empathic person, without naming it or associating it with a set of
After reading about empathy in Connecting Across Differences, I realized that not
everyone finds it easy to be empathetic, and it can be very hard for people to walk in others
shoes. From this awareness, my classmate and I developed our design teaching opportunity.
We went looking for more discussion on empathy, and we referred back to another reading from
our Communication by Design class, "Empathy on the Edge" by Katja ... Reading this article
was the first time I experienced the power of empathy as it's exercised in design. One example
of empathy presented in the article was a project that the design agency IDEO had with a
pharmaceutical company. The objective of the project was to ensure that the company was
being empathic around the experience of using an injectable therapy they'd designed. IDEO
implemented a month long immersive experience for 35 employees of the pharmaceutical
company to guide them in understanding the patients' experience and pain points, from product
packaging, to instructions, and patient support. This was a vivid example of how empathy can
be applied to even the smallest details in a design process.
We gathered our readings and learnings and applied them to designing an exercise that
involved iteratively practicing empathy. We had classmates use play-doh to design a chair
however they liked. We then provided 3 different personas and asked them to redesign their
chairs based on the needs of the personas. Finally, we asked them to pair up and redesign their
chairs based on their partner's needs and goals.
So by putting them through this experience we hoped to provide them with a better
understanding of empathy and its effects in design. With second and third activities we saw
how everyone really tried to put them selves in their subjects shoes and make sure what they
are designing is really suitable for them.We asked them to explain their decisions and everything they talked about was showing how they felt empathetic to towards their users.