Empathy at the heart of design

With the democratization of design approaches, empathy has become a fashionable concept. It is a foundation of collaborative design , and also the first step of Design Thinking according to Tim Brown. But what is empathy? Why and how to use it in design? If it is not innate, can empathy be worked? With this article, you will be able to see a little more clearly about this notion which is on the rise!

Empathy and sympathy, same fight ?

We often confuse empathy and sympathy:

Empathy is understanding these emotions without actually feeling them yourself.

You are in empathy when facing someone who has just lost a loved one, you understand their suffering and the mechanisms at play in them, you take them into account in your relationships, but without being yourself saddened by the disappearance of the person.

Sympathy is imagining the positive or negative emotions of others, and feeling them as if they were happening to us personally . It can bring together the phenomena of emotional contagion (such as giggles) or compassion (the fact of helping others to stop suffering).

These definitions are simple and effective, but let’s go a little further to see the value of all this in a design approach.

Sympathy is feeling with the other

You might think that the notion of empathy comes from antiquity, well no! What has existed since antiquity is not empathy but sympathy . Originally, sympathy in medicine designates the relationships between organs. It is in the modern period that sympathy begins to refer to the interactions of individuals and the sharing of their emotions by David Hume (1711–1776) and Adam Smith (1723–1790). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) the latter explains that faced with a situation, for example of torture, we can imagine what the tortured person feels, and suffer like him, failing to experience it by our own senses while being tortured ourselves:

“Even if one of our brothers is on the torture rack, as long as we are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he is suffering […] By the imagination, we place ourselves in his situation , we feel that we are enduring all his torments, as if we were entering his body. ”

Since it makes one stretch the imagination, sympathy is not automatic: it supposes that we recognize the other as one of our fellow human beings. This is surely why we have a lot more sympathy with a domestic animal like our dog or our cat, than with the mosquito that we shamelessly crush! It may well be our empathy for cats that explains the success of lolcats.

Today, thanks to advances in neurology and medical imaging, we are able to compare what these 18th century philosophers tell us, with the functioning of our brain. In the 1990s, Giacomo Rizzolatti’s scientific team , at the Parma Faculty of Medicine, discovered mirror neurons: they are the source of mimetic mechanisms that are also called “emotional contagion” such as yawn or giggle . Our brain reproduces external behaviors identically.Moreover, as incredible as it seems, we now know that the active brain areas are the same when we have an emotion, a sadness or a joy, and when we recognize this sadness or this joy in another person.

So what is empathy?

Empathy is a recent notion: in 1873, it was a philosopher named Robert Vischer who used the German term “ Einfühlung ” to express the experience one has of a work of art. The term will then be taken up and used by several psychologists (Karl Jaspers and Sigmund Freud) to define “ the human faculty to put oneself in the place of the other ”. At the beginning of the 20th century, it was translated into English and French by the term “empathy” (empathy). Empathy, central in design, therefore originates from aesthetic considerations! But what’s the difference between sympathy and empathy in this case?

This is because empathy is not the simple imitation of emotions, but an intense work of understanding what the other feels, as the French neuroscientist Nicolas Danziger asserts.. Understanding or emotional intelligence does not involve merging and feeling like the other, but identifying and understanding the emotions of others, and then putting words into them. A psychologist is not expected to suffer with his patients, but to understand them well enough to be able to help them properly. Likewise, the designer needs to empathize with users, but he doesn’t need to be sympathetic to them. Even if he goes so far as to live the user experience himself — for example by taking the place of the patient in an MRI machine — the designer seeks above all to understand the emotions of the user and from there his needs and aspirations.

Ultimately empathy is putting on the other’s shoes without taking their blisters.

Improve your empathy

As soon as we correctly distinguish sympathy and empathy, the question immediately seems less problematic and becomes “how to improve our knowledge of the emotions of others?” For the psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, empathy develops throughout life. Literature or the arts encourage the imagination and allow us to get out of our own representations . But it is above all by observing methodically that we are able to improve our understanding of the emotions of others. This is exactly what designers do.

The place of empathy in design

And now, what do we do with this?

In design, the user is the foundation of the process, hence the omnipresence of empathy. Tim Brown advocates that “ without understanding what others see, feel and experience, design is work without a goal ”. You have to understand why people do what they do.

For this, empathic design brings together a series of tools and techniques , often inspired by anthropology and ethnography, to understand latent motivations and needs. The idea that comes first is simply to question and listen to the user himself, via questionnaires, interviews, focus groups, etc. For a lot of reasons, there are inevitably biases and gaps, intentional or not, between what people say they experience and feel, and what they experience and feel fundamentally. To overcome this, we can observe the user, without realizing it or almost. Take out your camouflage uniform and go out into the field to capture the user on the spot: you will see what he is doing, you may detect emotions, but beware of over-interpretation.

A cut above: really put yourself in the user’s shoes and live the experience yourself. Take the bus with a child in a stroller to understand the difficulties parents have in getting around town, get into an elevator and simulate a breakdown to feel the stress generated, sit on a stretcher in the emergency hall …

The designer then seeks to become one with another person, he uses his own body and his mind to become the other, and to understand him better, but there too there are limits. Blindfolding to try to approach the daily life of a blind person will never amount to really living the experience of such a person whose senses have developed in a particular way.

Empathy by the wayside

Finally, if there is bias regardless of the method, is it really possible to empathize with users? For Don Norman, Director of the Design Lab at the University of California, a pioneer in the human-centric approach that popularized the term “user experience”, the answer is clearly no. He develops his point in an article published in 2019 on the Adobe blog (and translated into French here ).

If Norman approves of the theoretical principle of the use of empathy in design, it is impossible for him in practice: a designer designs solutions for hundreds, thousands, millions or even billions of users! For Norman “ we shouldn’t kid ourselves by thinking that we can get into their heads ”. There is an irreparable gap between the designer and the users. Therefore, we must instead focus on what people are trying to do and the capacities they are mobilizing, in order to make action possible. Should we then throw empathy with the bathwater?

The end of the story

Don Norman’s criticism of empathic design is not for him a way of moving away from the user: on the contrary, it allows him to deepen the reflection to understand what to do or not to do. , to respond effectively to its difficulties. The goal is not ultimately to understand what the user feels, but to obtain enough information to understand, then solve the real problems. Empathy is a means, not an end.

The key is to take sufficient distance vis-à-vis the information collected, with all the biases generated. To reduce them as much as possible and to approach, even if it is fundamentally impossible, the feelings of the users, we must cross the sources of information, while being aware of our prejudices and received ideas on “the typical user” . This is how we manage, for example, to build personae as archetypes that are as accurate and representative as possible of users. We will talk about it in a future article.

To conclude, let’s keep in mind that empathy is a faculty of understanding emotions, useful for understanding and solving problems, and that it is possible to stimulate and improve it through regular exercise . But beware ! It takes several years and constant experience to really improve your empathy and use it effectively in a design process. Hence the interest in working with trained and experienced designers. That’s good, the nod-A team is made up of several designers :-)