BLOG POST ONE
Of all the lectures in the series that I watched, I found Lorraine Gamman’s the most interesting. Her lecture was about empathy. In the hour that she presented, she explained that empathy is understanding and perspective taking or imagining the other person’s point of view however it’s also having an emotional response and feeling or identifying with that person. She also touched on the topic of user centred design and how it requires designers to have empathy with users, displaying how if designers do research in order to understand the user and their feelings or situation then they can design better for them. Lorraine mentioned active listening, cultural probes, empathy probes and going undercover as ways in which designers can do this research.
One thing that I found really fascinating in this lecture is Lorraine’s idea of using criminals or mis-users to better designs. She stated that criminals know the most about the problems with the products for example a pick pocketer would know all the tricks to steal something from a bag and would therefore be able to tell a designer how to make the bag safer.
Something else that Lorraine discussed is the concept of an empathy deficit and theories about why empathy is necessary in our world. Barack Obama famously wrote about this topic as well as Jeremy Rifkin who wrote a book called The Empathetic Civilisation and Peter Bazalgette who wrote The Empathy Instinct.
Lorraine spoke about ‘empathy things’, saying that they are not just objects and experience, but events that foster empathy between people. She mentioned The Empathy Museum and a project called A Mile In My Shoes in which people could take a pair of shoes and listen to their owners story.
Empathetic clothing accessories and fashion approaches are also topics that she spoke about as well as many other impressive projects and how they can empower vulnerable people or bring awareness to subjects such as animal welfare.
This lecture really made me think differently about empathy as previously I would just think of it personally and how I use it in my personal life however I have come to realise that empathy is a really important tool for a designer or creative and how it can be used to improve projects and ideas. The projects mentioned throughout this lecture clearly display how empathy and fashion in general can create better lives. One example being going into prisons to speak to criminals about what they did and then allowing them to design a better product. This is positive in many ways as the prisoner feels they are helping on a large scale and that they have a purpose and then at the end of it all there is a product that has been created. I watched lectures on culture, inclusion, cultural satiability etc. and they have all opened my eyes to how fashion can better lives.