Empathy in Design, Imagination & Wicked Problems

Empathic Design emerged from the difficulty to filter out the designer's intentions and interpretations in user-centric testing. In turn, researchers looked to the principle of empathy, or the "ability to understand and identify with another person's context, emotions, goals, and motivations" as a counterweight to this self-as-user bias (Quesenbery &; Szuc, 2011, p. 51).

Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, and Koskinen outline how throughout its progression from user-testing products to co-designing for larger systems solutions, four principals of Empathic Design remain:

1. People give meanings to things and act on these meanings, and these meanings both arise and are modified in interactions.

2. Because design comes by its meaning in real life, design research must be done in real life.</li>

3. Research methods should come from design and be visual and tactile, inspiration-enhancing, deliberately cheap and low tech, playful, tested in reality and targeted at the fuzzy front end of the design process.

4. Analysis of the research seeks to explicate meanings for design—not to create explanations (2014, p. 68).

My personal interest lies most in empathic design for wicked problems.

According to Crichton, and Carter wicked problems are social, cultural or environmental problems that appear impossible to solve because: • there is incomplete or contradictory knowledge about the problem itself; • the number of people and opinions involved and the potentially large economic burden add additional layers of complexity; and • the actual problem is interconnected with other problems.

The concept of wicked problems comes from the grand-daddy of Issue-Based Information Systems (IBIS) and Dialogue Mapping - Horst Rittel (Conklin, 2010).

Having used Rittle's IBIS & Dialogue Mapping for community research once or twice I am gripped at how empathic theory tools approach wicked questions with the nuance to match a situation's social complexity.

These exercises in Dialogue Mapping and group facilitation typified what Mattelmäki, Vaajakallio, and Koskinen described as the co-designing aspect of empathic enquiry. My experience with almost exclusively face-to-face, real-time iterations of co-designing makes it hard to imagine what that process looks like in digital communities.

How does one capture the synchronicity, ideation and, of course, empathy, of a room full of people in an online setting?

This, in fact, is the core question behind my interest in learning technology.

Mattelmäki and company do not provide an answer, but rather deepen the question. Some of the most effective examples of empathic design they feature are open-ended communication formats (2014, p. 74). From community-based visualizing tools to debate-based prototyping, I struggle to reimagine the same human-centric techniques in digital formats.

Copied from my Royal Roads University blog: Innovation Design + Learning Environments

How have you developed experiential, open, enquiry opportunities for online communities