I'm going to get so much sh*@ for this.
Hey all you design-types! Are you sympathetic or empathetic? Without using IDEOs definition, could you define each or either? Which word is older and where’d they come from? Which has changed its meaning? What should matter when designing? I’ll answer all these.
But Ben, “What’s your beef with empathy?” Great question, caller. My beef is how dishonest tactical-empathy sounds. I believe, when designers feel the need to employ empathy for users, empathy sounds dishonest because no matter how much empathy one employs; products, services, and solutions must and will always discount someone or some group.
While I do appreciate a simple rallying cry that helps designers learn how to discover all the scenarios for an audience that generate better products, the double edged sword exists. Empathy takes a ton of energy (Is often used as a means to argue a solution or critique another without having a conversation. I find empathy as a weapon, stops creative discussion) and when deployed, we feel we’ve done something special - we've tricked ourselves. We can all say we’ve been a good person and a good designer, today. Hi5 🙌.
Honestly, do we care that much? I am genuinely curious. And if one is genuinely empathic, one may become paralyzed to help the users they’re meant to feel for. Instead, I’d much rather learn how to solve best within the constraints of the group I’ll be solving for.
Then you might ask, “Ben, in your constrained group, can’t you use empathy to solve for them?” Well, yes I can, but I don’t care. Tactical-constraints make more sense to design for outcomes. Needs, motivations, attitudes, real life experiences formulate constraints and are still discovered through our user research. And designing for those constraints, is the job and even better, are measurable. No more excusing failed experiments because one wasn't empathetic enough. No more arguements that a designer is better than another because of empathy. Empathy is an extra step filled with unknowns and biases that, at best, creates blindspots.
Why not empathy? It makes us feel we’ve learned compassion, but what has changed? We’ve used empathy to talk about complexity. Instead of solving airline congestion problems, we've listened to the story of the girl sleeping on the floor on a yoga mat. Is her problem an uncomfortable mat or should we add beds at the gates? Empathy as a starting point strips away the complexity of the person or people (opposite of compassion) down to a feeling.
Even after the research one can do (at some point we have to get to building) we must leave behind other variables of human emotion and experiences to make our product for said humans. Human behavior is full of idiosyncrasies—understanding where they come from and how they manifest is a complex challenge. Thus, only so many solutions can fit into a single product.
We all say that “empathy helps us figure out what problems users are trying to solve.” To me, that is a tired phrase and one we counter the very next moment. We actually only look for problems after we have a product idea that we must then refine into product market fit. At best, the phrase assumes users know what they want. And that becomes the flip side of the argument for empathy. How or when does a user know what they want? During research one should never asks what users want or what users will do. We learn to never ask a user for a solution to a problem. Our job is to find solutions ins service of outcomes.
My point is that design doesn’t need empathy to learn what problems users face. Observation is fine. Listening works. Asking questions helps. Those are not empathetic actions. They are scientific ones. And we’ve employed them well before IDEO.
Back to the questions
Which is older and where’d they come from?
Sympathy means to walk in someone else’s shoes. And we believe sympathy requires one to have a similar experience to relate. Wrong. Yet, our newer word of empathy comes from German to mean, “In feeling”. Which is how we use empathy today.
Which has its meaning changed?
We rarely use sympathy being afraid of shame. We’re told sympathy requires pity of someone else. Wrong. It’s noble, but unnecessary in our case. Empathy has become the emotional connection du jour that means one must feel what another feels. But this is what sympathy means. We’ve added empathy to our lexicon to produce a result that may even harm how we design. A case against empathy, summarized by Vox in 2019 based on Paul Bloom’s book from 2016, coins “rational compassion” as a healthier and more realistic behavior humans should elicit.
What should matter when designing?
“Rational Compassion” is a remedy to the boringness of mainstream-design-guru phrases. Rational Compassion is not a call to action, but a natural behavior that disassociates from design skill levels. It’s something everyone already does when trying to learn a subject matter, about user, a problem, or solution. The “Rational” is scientific and obvious. It’s against the irrationality of emotional empathy as the rationale drops the emotional baggage or reactionary biases of feeling.
Compassion is simple too. It’s the act of understanding others are different - differences are those constraints I talked about above. It promotes curiosity as a state of being vs. a tactic of design. In this case, Rational and Compassion go together. The humanities and the scientific. The Rational and natural behaviors of Compassion already exist within good designers, friends, parents, therapist — humans. We observe, listen, ask, and learn from our own experiences and from others’. This defines compassion — the recognition of others and the differences from ourselves.
In this case, empathy feels made up. It feels like we changed the definition to suit our needs when other words already existed. It feels like a means to a selfish end (we feel better if we employ it). Instead, I find we don’t need a new fangled term to describe how to be better designers. Our better natures already set us up for healthy, viable, caring, and thoughtful actions aimed at others. Why not teach that? A life skill versus a design skill.
I don’t care if you use the term empathy to describe your methods. It doesn’t impress me. It doesn’t show me how you think. We don't like buzzwords because they make one seem thoughtless or disingenuous.
Can we concentrate our natural ability of Rational Compassion as a means to transform our human condition and foster diverse experiences? Let’s not only think of our design jobs.