I own a book on Victorian inventions that I enjoy flipping through. Its pages bring to mind an era of optimism driven by the thrill of technological advancement – the feeling that all a capable person needed was an idea and the will to succeed. In fact, many of the ideas invented during that era still remain an integral part of our daily experiences today, although one sometimes wonders about the ones that did not make it into the history books.
Imagine what the era must have been like. The promise of the industrial revolution, burgeoning uses for electricity, the rise of mechanical engineering and a generous and evolving patenting system must have held great promise to makers and inventors. Indeed one Henry Ellsworth, a Patent Office Commissioner summarises the mindset of that era nicely, when he is said to have stated “The advancement of the arts, from year to year, taxes our credulity and seems to presage the arrival of that period when human improvement must end.” He clearly thought that there may have been nothing more to invent.
Electricity as a Product Differentiator – Its hard for me to visualise a society where people aspired to this product as a result of this Ad. How many pieces of this were sold, I wonder?
The Thrill and the Irresponsibility of Invention
Mechanization and the advances in technology were certainly key drivers, and as this articlewith entries from the Design Registry of UK’s Board of Trade from the 1800s will show, the very excitement of automation often saw designs that were not just ludicrous, but sometimes outright dangerous to its customers. It seemed that the excitement of applying new technologies for consumer use meant that inventors often overlooked the end users themselves, sometimes putting them in very real danger.
Early refrigerators for instance were very useful, and more importantly denoted status and wealth in communities that had evolved traditional food preservation systems. Refrigerators announced a shift in status, and set apart those few families that could afford them. While these early models were certainly fashionable, they also leaked toxic gases such as ammonia and sulphur dioxide, which could be fatal.
It seems that as technologies become cheaper and more widely accepted, their threat levels recede accordingly (sometimes after significant damage had already been done.)
“Early adopters are really just unpaid user acceptance testers.” – Theo Priestley
Certain industries acknowledge and plan for this gradient. Clinical trials in the Pharma industry or Road trials in the transport sector are good examples. However, there are far more industries where such guard-rails do not exist and the one that stands out the most today is the Software industry.
It’s 2019 and Inventions are still harming customers
You will recognize the technological rush of the Victorian era that I described earlier in the software industry today. Social media platforms are a prime example. The excitement of using new types of web technologies, the possibilities of mining big-data and the sheer thrill of user-growth seems to have blinded platform owners to the harmful psychological and social effects of such technologies. There is even a push by US lawmakers to introduce curbs against the use of dark patterns in social media implementation.
So here we are at a stand-off. On the one hand for technological innovation we need a user base that is willing to suffer the consequences of as yet unknown fall-outs. On the other, human decency requires us to control such instances which (in no uncertain terms) lead to real human misery and suffering.
I argue that this is the primary role of designers. To not just multiply the potential uses of technology, but to also arrest it – to mitigate its ill-effects when it is rolled out to a trusting customer. One of the ways designers do this involves empathy.
I argue that this is the primary role of designers. To not just multiply the use of technology, but to also arrest it – to mitigate its ill-effects. One of the ways designers do this involves empathy.
What is Empathy really?
You’ll be lucky to find a convenient description that is also accurate, because empathy is one of those hard-to-pin-down experiences. It could be described as an ability to feel what another person is feeling, but that sort of answer just raises more questions. Such as – how do you know what the other person is feeling, or if your experience can even be representative of what the other person is feeling. Empathy doesn’t seem to be a universal value either.
The literature that I have come across paints a complicated picture and if there is one thing that is now clear – it is that empathy is not at all the benign, fuzzy and warm virtue that I thought it was back in design school. If anything, I am acutely aware of the harmful and sometimes disastrous consequences of empathy.
Empathy can be irrational
For instance, empathy is innumerate, as Paul Bloom points out – “favouring the one over the many.” Don Norman in his recent critique of empathic design also points out the same shortcoming. Designing for a specific individual is very different from designing for groups of people (some products have a user base in the millions).
Empathic experiences are elicited more strongly from appeals to sentiment than to reason, and has been blamed for biases such as the Identifiable Victim Effect which can lead to disastrous design decisions (especially in the area I design for – Development and Social Impact). Aid funders for instance can be easily manipulated by user stories such as that of an individual suffering child, and make the wrong choices, even in the face of rational information.
Empathy can erode
Empathy can also be eroded as observed in the study of empathy erosion in medical school students. The constant immersion in the study of the human body and its conditions may have the effect of desensitizing the physician, to the patient as a person. Some medical schools are redesigning their curricula around this observation. One can imagine a similar erosion in empathy in design teams who are immersed in the minutiae of the inner workings of products in perpetual beta.
Empathy is an attenuated experience
Studies show that when we do feel someone else’s pain, it is to a lesser extent, which perhaps makes sense from an evolutionary perspective. You want to be affected enough to understand someone’s pain, not be incapacitated by it. This also means that we will never get a complete picture of someone else’s circumstances, and chances are we might even ascribe the wrong drivers to the experience.
More complexities in perspective taking
There are some further complexities to taking another person’s perspective. The curse of knowledge, a cognitive bias that occurs when we assume the other person has the background to understand what we are saying, affects one’s ability to accurately predict the ease with which other people solve problems. Experienced user interface designers for instance may assume what is simple and straight-forward to them will be the same for their users. Studies in visual hindsight bias show the gaps in such expectations.
More recent studies demonstrate that perspective taking may in fact decrease accuracy in understanding the other person, and instead argue for getting perspective (through conversations for example) instead, a method that social scientists have relied on for decades.
The emergence of McEmpathy
As though all of this wasn’t complicated enough for the designer to untangle, we also have the rise of McEmpathy – the business world’s take on the subject. McEmpathy is an attempt by various business stakeholders to empathise with their customers through all sorts of models and frameworks. Most commonly used are Customer Personas and Empathy Maps, which are used during workshops to identify potential customer types and ascribe to them various feelings and states of mind. This is done with the intention of putting oneself into the shoes of one’s customer.
This sounds great in theory, but rarely holds true in practice. For one, designers and other business stakeholders do not actually have lived-experiences in their target communities the way anthropologists or development practitioners do. A lot of what you see in organisations is hit and run style interviews with stand-ins for customers (friends and family) and a lot of conference-room pontification with regards to the mindsets of users. Designers in these types of organisations don’t actually have the time to do any sort of immersive customer learning and have to make do with cookie-cutter models.
Dealing with McEmpathy
McEmpathy is a slippery slide. Empathy studies point out the role of empathy seen through mutual aid in tribal behaviour. Our social groups afford us physical and emotional protection, and we may empathise more with members of our own in-groups.
To design teams working within large organizations, the effects of this will be quite evident. There are both subtle and overt nudges that push product development to benefit shareholders over customers. True customer centricity through human centered design seems to be very hard to achieve in large teams (ironically). I have seen embedded design teams in large organisations in Bangalore having barely enough time allocated for even wireframing concepts, let alone user research.
Applying empathic design in these scenarios can become tricky. It could either become another Naam ke Vaaste design practice or worse, it could paint an entirely wrong picture.
Independent studios seem to do better in this regard, being able to integrate better into target communities and without the pressure of shareholder profitability or compliance to organizational frameworks, although they seem to be in turn giving way to Big Design. (Will Taylorist pressures eventually turn Big Design into more modern versions of their client organisations? Lets hope not.)
So, what is a Designer to Do?
At this point I’m not sure I have a concrete list of takeaways that will make it all better. I’m not an expert on empathy in any case. The best I can do is offer these broad pieces of advice for other designers based off of what I’ve learned so far.
Don’t drink the Kool-Aid
From what I make of the situation – don’t drink the kool-aid. Organisations have a penchant for creating models and frameworks out of any seemingly meaningful research or theory from academia. Angela Duckworth’s idea of Grit and her subsequent research turns into GRIT® (A Leadership coaching system I think). Or how Howard Gardner’s Theory of Multiple Intelligences came to inspire frameworks, not just in management, but also in education. Recognise a fad when you see one – it may have something meaningful at its core, but don’t fall for all the fluff around it.
Unsubscribe from the positivity cult
I think one of the problems with McEmpathy is that it is in some strange, cultural way entwined with positive-thinking. Positive thinking seems to be partly an appropriation from psychoanalysis and new age spirituality, and generally means that one has the power to reframe situations as positive. When you discuss Empathy, be very aware of conflating it with positive thinking – stick with objective descriptions of the problem.
Recognise institutionalised thinking
Design-thinking has already been institutionalized, and since empathy turns up so much in design-thinking rhetoric, it is currently in the process of being institutionalized as well. Design firms have already started creating frameworks to map and chart empathy. The process of creating Personas as a design artefact can become reflexive, and McEmpathy, which in part derives from such personification, cannot be far behind. Recognize institutionalized ideas, be agreeable about them in public if you have to, but personally – be suspicious of convenient explanations.
Form your own conclusions
Instead of reading interpretations of concepts like empathy via management and design literature, seek out the original source. Subscribe to magazines on Art and Science (or crossovers) for instance, and bookmark the interesting ones. (I use Zotero to organise my collection of papers) Apply the more stable and salient findings in your day to day work, and iterate based on your learning. Be scientific and form your own conclusions.
End Notes
- To be clear, I’m not saying that empathy is bad or empathic design is useless. Far from it, I think being open to experiencing the user’s problems can be an important driver. I’m only cautioning against institutionalising ideas that are still in the process of being defined. BTW, here is a more philosophical rendition on the subject from a couple of years ago.
- Studying design history is harder because historic narratives don’t always record failed inventions. Maybe that is the problem. As Alex Rosenberg, a philosopher, explains it, when we see history as stories, we frequently get it wrong because story driven explanations don’t capture the complexity of cause and effect. Maybe what we conveniently call history are just those ideas, people or institutions that made it into our narratives – a sort of survivorship bias.
- I didn’t come up with the term McEmpathy, Pascal Wicht did. See his comment in this post.
- For the context to Theo Priestley’s quote, see the comment in this post.
- The McEmpathy cartoon is by Charles Barsotti.
- My friend Arko describes the cult of positivity like this. (See his comment in this post)
“I’m given steak. I put sugar into it. I’m given wine. I put sugar into it. Seafood – sugar. Omlette – sugar. Bitter vegetables – sugar.
I eventually die of diabetes. That’s what positivity is like.”
