Blog Post 1 – Reflection on Lectures

Thoughtful, engineered design is such a large contributing factor to a products success, along with trending aesthetics and clever ergonomic design – especially with garment production. However, through Lorraine Gamman’s lecture on Empathy and user centred design, my outlook on how to design empathetically, to gain the emotional contentment of the user has changed. 

The lecture began with understanding that as a designer within any practice, you must place yourself within the shoes of the imagined user/viewer, whilst also creating a successful balance between complete emotional investment and detached non-user centred design. Gamman emphasised through the words of Koskinen, K(2015)that ‘designers should be more sensitive to users in order to understand them’. Remaining in this state of equilibrium whilst still being able to identify with the other and understanding their needs from your own perspective, requires designers to use a framework known as the 4 stages of empathy design. 

Empathy Design Stages

• Discovery.At this stage you must be able to enter the user’s world and understand their utility needs as well as their unspoken needs (by observing struggles that they face through existing products or lack of. Through this stage designers uses intuition, imagination and convey emotional sensitivity in order to create and design to make a valuable difference. 

• Immersion.Here the designer must place themselves in the position of the users immediate context and environment to better understand them. The idea being that through this stage of empathetic research you begin to uncover the intangible needs that are missing in the product you’re looking to change or create. This process can be carried out through fieldwork, which is most effective as you can study a person’s kinesicsand general movements directly. 

• Connection. Designing empathetically requires more than just listening to the subjects, you have to interpret the world through their values and understand what is most important to them. Their cultural backgrounds and social structures are massively important to the functionality of day to day lives. At this stage you have to appear sincere and understanding which in turn will give you a more empathetic insight when designing. 

• Detaching. As mentioned, to remain professional and focussed on the products design, you must then remove yourself from the research and apply the experiences into the design process. The valuable insights that you’ve learnt will allow for products to be designed to solve problems but to also understand what has led to these solutions. Being able to step in and out of the user’s life will give the greatest framework when designing for the user. 

Gamman also taught through this empathy design process that the creation of these empathy things, and not just surplus objects or experiences, lead to genuine improvement in the lives of the users/viewers. Although there remained a few arguments against empathy design as its been noted as a reason that people promote inequality and immorality in society, which Paul Bloom explores in his work entitled ‘Against Empathy: the case for rational compassion which I will follow up with.