Blog 1
I have seen some lectures on “better lives” and I have enjoyed the unit from the theme to the structure. I think the topics discussed in these lectures are critical and forward-looking. In the lecture of better lives that I saw, there were many excellent and mature designers or experts who had unique views on some social situations. One of the most interesting was professor Lorraine Gamman’s talk on empathy. “Designers often use empathy to understand the perspectives of others,” she says. Roman Krznarick(2014) defines empathy as ” the art of stepping imaginatively into the shoes of another person, understanding their feelings and perspectives and using that understanding to guide your actions”.
At the beginning, I was attracted by her personal profile, which said her work with the extend Empathy network and also the Design Against Crime Research. This is a field I have never touched before, and I listened to the speech carefully. Among them, she gave a very interesting example. They designed an “empathy suit” which could allow non-pregnant people to experience the life of pregnant people. I think such a simple design can enhance the sense of social responsibility of many young people and make them think about what is procreation and whether to procreate or not. And a lot of people think that pregnancy is a necessary stage for a woman, it is not a hard thing. I think this design can help these prejudiced people to recognize the hardship of pregnancy, enhance their sense of social responsibility, so that pregnant women can be more protected and contribute to social development. It also helped to make people more understanding of equal rights activists.
Similarly, she also showed some other empathy suits, such as those for young people to experience the needs of the elderly and for thin people to experience the life of obese patients. In my opinion, these designs have improved the attention and social responsibility of users and designers in the two aspects of “paying attention to the quality of life of the elderly” and “paying attention to the quality of life of the obese”. These designs enable experience-seekers to better understand the elderly and people of different body types, and also enable designers to design products that can meet the needs of these people. This lecture gave me a lot of new ideas that I had never seen before and brought me a lot of changes. In the past, I always subconsciously assumed that what I designed was for those underweight young people, but if I really faced some difficult groups, I would be at a loss what to do. After this lecture, I will pay more attention to the living situation of a few people and try to make improvements in my design that are beneficial to the whole society. This lecture is very helpful to enhance teenagers’ sense of social responsibility, and the overall style is not boring and easy to accept, which I like very much.
Reference：
Krznaric, R., 2014. Empathy. Ebury Publishing.
Gamman, L., 2020. Better Lives Empathy Lecture.