blog post 2
The better lives themes which I have engaged with in this term have defiantly had an impact on my way of thinking when it comes to looking at future projects in and outside of university. I felt a real immersive feeling to a range of lectures and the themes they spoke about but one of the themes that resonated with me in particularly was Lorraine Gamman Empathy lecture.
The main aspects of this talk were the idea of when starting a project about a particular theme or idea, being able to step into the position and understand this we must have an idea of the two components of empathy. The first half of empathy is emotional response, feelings and identifying with, and the other is understanding, perspective taking and imagining the other. This small aspect of the lecture gave me a greater understanding of the concept of empathy as it gave me this template to consider when taking empathy into consideration in the future of my own work. Gamman drew examples from her own experiences of this way of working and mentioned here work with prison inmates for her design against crime research. She shared the emotional connection that having empathy and working with inmates had on herself and finds that whenever using empathy physically to help and get an idea of being in someone else’s shoes makes the outcome a lot more rewarding and enjoyable. With this lecture in mind I have already started trying to be more empathetic not only in my work but a little more than usual in my everyday life to become more understanding of how people react to certain situations as I personally feel that there’s a future project in something related to that. In the end section of this lecture we came to 3 key elements to remember when designing for empathy which were, creating experiences for another but what types of experiences created are important, the second is was being able to recognise other perspectives of the experiences you have created and finally affective empathy which usually only takes place when there’s direct contact between people. All these points and ideas shown throughout this lecture has provided some really interesting ways of developing my work and approaching future projects, it has also given me some motivation to revisit old projects which now with the idea of using empathy for design it can now give my work that extra bit of depth.