Category: Speaking Engagements

This article is a companion piece to the WordCamp Europe 2016 talk “Empathy and Acceptance in Design and Community” seen below:

Understanding Empathy

Our ability to share the feelings of our fellow humans, to put ourselves in their shoes and see the world from their perspective, is a cornerstone of communal society. But shine a light on this skill and its luster quickly fades. What appears an ability to share the experience of another reveals itself an unconscious projection of our own experiences and biases onto other people.

Empathy is the mid-point on a graduated scale of automatic emotional response, starting with Sympathy and ending with Compassion. It is quick, instinctive, easily manipulated, and often misleading.

When we see a child drop their ice cream, we have an immediate emotional reaction: We have Sympathy, feeling for the child (how sad), we have Empathy, we feel with the child (if I dropped my ice cream, I’d be sad too), we may even have Compassion, feeling a need to step in and help the child (here you go, you can have mine). Here, Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion work to better the situation and the world. But that’s not always the case.

In the aftermath of natural disasters, communities often experience a “second disaster” in the form of unwanted donations of clothes, perishable food, and other consumables. In many cases, managing these items, donated by well-meaning bystanders, ends up adding additional cost to the rebuilding of the affected communities. Empathy leads us to donate things when what the community needs is financial help.

When companies make accommodations for people with disabilities, they often inadvertently erect obstacles that hinder access to the very services they are trying to make more available. Empathy leads us to create obstacles where a clear path is needed.

When we put empathy in the driver’s seat, we quite literally put ourselves in someone else’s shoes. We are not basing our actions on the true experiences of others but rather projecting ourselves onto them: Were I in that situation, this is what I would want. But unless we are, or have been, in the same situation with the same prior experiences, our automatic emotional response can lead us badly astray resulting in solutions that work counter to our intentions: Put too much trust in your empathy, and you may end up making a bad situation worse.

Empathy has an important place in our processes, designs, and interactions: It is the beginning of an exploration that should be part of every project.

A Pathway to Informed, Critical Empathy

To create informed human designs, and welcoming communities, we need to use our automatic emotional responses wisely, and make ourselves aware of when we are projecting our own experiences onto others so we can focus on their experiences rather than our own.

Reframe

When you feel the swell of Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion, it is a sign you are forming an emotional connection with another person. Seize this moment to explore the current contexts of your partner and yourself, and make sure they overlap. If not, reframe the situation in a context you are familiar with. While an able-bodied person cannot know what it is like to live without the use of a leg, they may have experienced a temporary disability through an injury in the past. Establish a shared or analog context, and extend it by imagining not just standing in the other person’s shoes, but walking a lifetime in them. Actively informing your empathy by reframing the situation in a familiar context will help you move beyond an automatic emotional response to a more reflected one.

To further develop this process, check out Microsoft’s Inclusive Design Toolkit..

Relive

With your context reframed, take the next step by attempting to Relive the experience of the other person as close as you can. Create situations or environments where you can recreate a similar experience to theirs, taking strides to physically walk a mile in their shoes. The Relive process can take many forms. A common method is so-called empathy exercises where participants are subjected to physical constraints that simulate disability, old age, or other factors.The Age Gain Now Empathy System from MIT’s Age Lab is one example, the pregnancy empathy belly another. Walking a mile in someone else’s shoes can also be taken literally. After reading a Facebook post about aCanadian waiter forced to wear high heels for a full shift even though her toes bled, Swedish contractor Emil Andersson bought a pair of pink 10cm heels and went to work for a day.

Reliving the experience of others by immersing yourself in their experience can be both rewarding and eye opening. Much can be learned from spending a week without a mouse or touchpad, unplugging your monitor, using text-to-speech for a day, using an old smartphone, or switching away from your preferred operating system. Reliving social experiences can challenge our perceptions and give us a new appreciation for the plight of others. Taking the time to read Twitter threads like #YesAllWomen, #MaybeHeDoesntHitYou, #BlackLivesMatter, and #NoWomanEver brings the plight of marginalized groups front of mind and helps broaden our social horizons. Getting some friends together and reading hateful internet comments to each other shows us that words matter and can be just as damaging as physical actions.

Remind

Our empathy is firmly rooted in our own life experiences and social and emotional biases. In Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains how our thought processes are split into System 1 (fast, reactive, emotional) and System 2 (slow, reflective, logical) and how tacit bias, availability, proximity, and the other factors that power System 1 often lead us widely astray. Sympathy, Empathy, and Compassion fit firmly under System 1 and are prone to all these errors. When you make decisions as a designer or developer, you are doing so based on years of privileged experience that has shaped your tacit biases toward your own preferences. When you design or develop solutions for other people, you have to work from a realization your audience does not share this privilege, and does not see the world through your eyes. To create successful solutions, actively remind yourself of your privilege and bias by forcing them into focus. This moves your thought process from the emotional and reactive System 1 to the reflective System 2, and you can take a critical look at your initial reaction and inform your response in a more balanced way.

To provide a framework for bringing your tacit biases into focus, try documenting your experiences learning a new skill or taking part in unfamiliar tasks, situations, or communities. If you’re a developer, learn an unfamiliar programming language. If you’re a designer, take up an unfamiliar creative skill like quilting, knitting, painting, or calligraphy. To bring your tacit knowledge into focus, try your hand at teaching or writing documentation. And most importantly, document your experience, your successes, and your failures, for future reference. That way you have your own experiences to reflect on when you need a reminder of what it was like to not know what you know now.

To delve deeper into this process, and explore the concept of Compassionate Design, check out the book Design for Real Life by Eric Meyer and Sara Wachter-Boettcher.

Accept

The fourth and final step of the exploration may also prove the most challenging: Meet your subjects with acceptance. Seek out and listen to the disclosure of other people, and treat them as true descriptions of the world. When we interact with other people, it’s easy to assume we share a common context, background, and experience. In our modern multicultural world, and especially in interactions over the internet, none of these are given. In fact, chances are the only context and experience you and the other person share is the current situation you are in. This poses a uniquely modern challenge: We are hardwired to assume shared context and shared experiences. When these are missing, our automatic emotional response systems tend to make snap judgements that are way off the mark: Our empathy leads us astray, and misunderstandings and misjudgments cause communication to break down.

To counteract this tendency, follow these five rules in your interaction with the people you meet:

• Listen to them without interruption
• Accept their disclosure as the truth
• Question your immediate response
• Seek common ground
• Expand your horizon of understanding

Human Design

At a conference last year, I said “At the core of good design lies empathy for people.” I still believe this, but I’ve come to realize that empathy alone can stand in the way of successful communication and designs. By informing our empathy and taking a critical look at our own emotional responses, we can create better designs and communities because we place the people we communicate with at the center of our process.