“Becoming a designer is not just a matter of honing your practical skills, there’s a new language to get familiar with. This series of articles explores some of the most important words used in studios, websites and universities around the world. It lets you know why these terms are so significant and gives you tips on how to use them to your advantage.”
Aysar Ghassan continues our series on Design Keywords with an article on ‘Empathy’.
Educators>Scroll to bottom of page to read suggested homework tasks for students after reading this article.
Right now you may be taking a break from brushing up on your perspective drawing or resolving a pesky CAD model. It’s easy to show off your knack for form development but other talents are more difficult to demonstrate. One of these is your ability to develop empathy with users. This article focuses on this mysterious keyword.
A Car Designer Showing off his Sketching Ability
The term ‘empathy’ has been around for about 100 years. Originally, it described how we get drawn into gazing at interesting works of art [1]. It then broadened to include how humans sometimes think they can transport themselves into the minds of others [2].
What’s in Her Very Famous Smile?
In the design world lots of people are using empathic ways of working to create great products and services for folks who use them. Designers term these people ‘users’ and this kind of work is (unsurprisingly) called ‘user-centred design’.
Designers used to concentrate on getting ‘practical’ information from users so that they could, for example, figure out how tall they might be or what age brackets they fell into. This meant viewing users as numerical date [3]. It’s now more usual for designers to see humans not as numbers but…well…as humans:
“Design empathy means that people are seen and understood from where they stand, not as test subjects but as persons with feelings”. [4]
‘Germ Free Adolescents’ in Test Tubes. Credit: mtarvainen
A research method called ‘ethnography’ helps designers see a more rounded picture of people. Here designers (or specialist researchers) become engrossed in users’ lives, observing what they do at home, at work and in their places of leisure [5]. Design researchers say ethnography relies on:
“empathy for understanding what it feels like to be [another person]” [6]
Let’s now look at how designers at one of the world’s most famous design and innovation companies Seymoupowell develop empathy with users. Founded in 1984 by Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, this London-based, award-winning agency has created many ‘milestone’ products.
Richard Seymour & Dick Powell, Founders of Seymourpowell
Seymourpowell’s headquarters encompasses a design studio, research centre, materials library and a prototyping workshop.
Seymourpowell are based in South West London
Alex Pearce (an industrial designer) is one of Seymourpowell’s 90 creative professionals. To create empathy with users, designers need to have a good appreciation of the people they’re designing for. Alex says this is why Seymourpowell have always worked with users to develop products.
Alex Pearce, Designer at Seymourpowell
In consultancies, clients’ wishes often determine the type of work designers do with users. Seymourpowell’s clients already know a lot about their customers, so they want fresh insights:
“We seek out more progressive users […] people who are using products and technology in advanced or pioneering ways. For instance when we designed the Kolon Sports jacket we interviewed Mountaineers, ex UK Special Forces operatives, Polar Explorers and Professors of human thermodynamics. All people who push their equipment to breaking point and can provide you with the knowledge and experiences need to undertake that sort of project”.
Kolon Sports Jacket Designed by Seymourpowell
Seymourpowell often work with users during the prototyping stage so that they can play with and discuss the merits of a tangible 3-dimensional item:
“We use model making to show finished designs to garner their opinions and inform us on the next design phases”.
Users Interacting With Prototypes at Seymourpowell
As well as this, Seymourpowell employ ethnographers to observe people in the spaces in which they use products and services:
“How someone thinks they use a product is quite different to how they actually use it, and by actually going and witnessing it for yourself you can identify behaviours people aren’t aware they have”.
A Seymourpowell Ethnographer at Work
They also recruit researchers who study global shifts in factors like the economy and people’s attitude to environmental factors. Alex says this helps Seymourpowell identify:
“How and why the consumer’s behaviours are changing because of these factors and how they will change in the future.”
This information helps Seymourpowell’s designs remain successful in changing cultural climates. As well as collaborating with ethnographers and trend forecasters, Alex works with a host of other professionals involved in the product development cycle:
“It’s about making each of the touch points pleasurable and functional, whether it be the products itself, the packaging, the purchasing experience or the tone of voice that embodies the brand”.
So, to succeed, Alex has to be flexible in his work. He believes that Seymourpowell’s reputation for innovation comes in part from their multidisciplinary focus on users:
“Part of the reason we have come to have so many different disciplines under one roof is because we are able to unify lots of different parts of the overall user experience […] I think very few companies out there concentrate on all the touch points of a user experience”.
A Multidisciplinary Meeting at Seymourpowell
As Alex has hinted, Seymourpowell’s considerable investment in understanding and working with users is tied to the importance of the first Keyword in this series of articles—the need to create great experiences for consumers:
“The idea of a good user experience boils down to all the different touch points a user has with a product. On its most basic level any pain points when interacting with a product will be detrimental to the experience”.
This brings us back to our mysterious term: how do Seymourpowell define empathy. Alex says:
“Empathy is understanding people’s relationship with things on an emotional level.”
Developing an emotional connection can bring great rewards. Alex says that products are often designed and sold according to their function or specification, for example how fast a car goes or how many megabytes a computer has. This is only effective up to a point, so smart designers have begun to work differently:
“[we] are concentrating on what the product brings to the life of the user, and trying to cement an emotional attachment”.
Alex believes it’s difficult to give tips to help designers to be more empathic. The hardest challenge comes in measuring users’ feelings and relaying them in a way that makes sense to clients:
“It is easy to communicate that someone liked something, it is harder to communicate how much that person likes it. So for me often the challenge is being able to pick on what people say and how they say it, and then to be able to translate that into a story you can tell a client”.
Alex does however have some tips for working with users in focus groups. Think about where you intend to do your research:
“People tend to be more open in their own space where they are comfortable and in control.”
Feeling at Home…At Home.
Stay alert and centered during your study. It will take a lot of time to organise a focus group and you might only get one chance:
“Make sure you are with your respondents at the point where the action happens. Emerge yourself into his/her world. Observe and question even the obvious. Often you will get the richest insights from observation.”
Once you have your information, you’ll need to filter it carefully before communicating with clients:
“we never say to a client that we should do something because a user has said so, our response is more to take influence from users and try and find new and interesting perspectives”.
In conclusion, Alex says don’t let working with users become design-by-committee:
“it is sometimes important to recognise and stick with your gut reactions, good designs can be made bad if too many people have too much of a say, remember that you are still leading the design process and research is meant to inspire rather than lead.”
There’s only so far you can get by imagining how users might interact with products or services you’re creating. It’s especially difficult to picture how someone who is of a very different age to you or is in a completely different state of health feels about your designs. Employers will look to see how you approach working with people. Don’t be embarrassed to practice ethnography with your friends and family. Plan your studies well. How might you film without making people feel self-conscious? It’s important to relay users’ stories succinctly in your portfolio. If you’re new to ethnography it will take you several attempts to get this right!
If you’re at university, fill in ethical clearance forms with time to spare. Thinking ahead will mean you’ll have plenty of research material to inform your designs and to talk about in interviews. It will also show employers that you’re organised and aware of what’s going in design right now—invaluable traits in any design workplace!
With markets flooded with products and services, creating great user experiences often means developing ‘authentic’ goods and ways of interacting. The next article in this series talks about the idea of authenticity.
Suggested homework Tasks for Students
1 - Please write about 3 brands/companies who have introduced an initiative that demonstrates empathy in the recent two or three years.
2 - Please choose a brand/company and suggest an initiative they could do that demonstrates empathy.
3 - With the brand/company chosen in task 2, suggest how you might hold a focus group to learn more about users' feelings towards the product or service.
If you enjoyed reading Design Keywords: Empathy, read more from the ARTS THREAD series on Design Keywords.
Aysar Ghassan teaches Automotive and Transport Design at Coventry University. He writes on 21st Century Design Philosophy and Design Education in international journals and conferences
REFERENCES
[1] Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2013) Empathy. Accessed: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/
[2] Allport, G. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
[3] Ghassan, A., and Blythe, M. (2013) On Legitimacy: Designer as Minor Scientist. In Mackay, W. E. (Ed) Proceedings of CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp.2149-2158.
[4] Mattelmäki and Battarbee (2002) Empathy probes. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, T.Binder, J.Gregory, I.Wagner (Eds.), Malmo, Sweden, pp. 266.
[5] Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008, April) Empathy and experience in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 637- 646.
[6] Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008) Empathy and experience in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 640.
Aysar Ghassan continues our series on Design Keywords with an article on ‘Empathy’.
Educators>Scroll to bottom of page to read suggested homework tasks for students after reading this article.
Right now you may be taking a break from brushing up on your perspective drawing or resolving a pesky CAD model. It’s easy to show off your knack for form development but other talents are more difficult to demonstrate. One of these is your ability to develop empathy with users. This article focuses on this mysterious keyword.
A Car Designer Showing off his Sketching AbilityThe term ‘empathy’ has been around for about 100 years. Originally, it described how we get drawn into gazing at interesting works of art [1]. It then broadened to include how humans sometimes think they can transport themselves into the minds of others [2].
What’s in Her Very Famous Smile?In the design world lots of people are using empathic ways of working to create great products and services for folks who use them. Designers term these people ‘users’ and this kind of work is (unsurprisingly) called ‘user-centred design’.
Designers used to concentrate on getting ‘practical’ information from users so that they could, for example, figure out how tall they might be or what age brackets they fell into. This meant viewing users as numerical date [3]. It’s now more usual for designers to see humans not as numbers but…well…as humans:
“Design empathy means that people are seen and understood from where they stand, not as test subjects but as persons with feelings”. [4]
‘Germ Free Adolescents’ in Test Tubes. Credit: mtarvainenA research method called ‘ethnography’ helps designers see a more rounded picture of people. Here designers (or specialist researchers) become engrossed in users’ lives, observing what they do at home, at work and in their places of leisure [5]. Design researchers say ethnography relies on:
“empathy for understanding what it feels like to be [another person]” [6]
Let’s now look at how designers at one of the world’s most famous design and innovation companies Seymoupowell develop empathy with users. Founded in 1984 by Richard Seymour and Dick Powell, this London-based, award-winning agency has created many ‘milestone’ products.
Richard Seymour & Dick Powell, Founders of SeymourpowellSeymourpowell’s headquarters encompasses a design studio, research centre, materials library and a prototyping workshop.
Seymourpowell are based in South West LondonAlex Pearce (an industrial designer) is one of Seymourpowell’s 90 creative professionals. To create empathy with users, designers need to have a good appreciation of the people they’re designing for. Alex says this is why Seymourpowell have always worked with users to develop products.
Alex Pearce, Designer at SeymourpowellIn consultancies, clients’ wishes often determine the type of work designers do with users. Seymourpowell’s clients already know a lot about their customers, so they want fresh insights:
“We seek out more progressive users […] people who are using products and technology in advanced or pioneering ways. For instance when we designed the Kolon Sports jacket we interviewed Mountaineers, ex UK Special Forces operatives, Polar Explorers and Professors of human thermodynamics. All people who push their equipment to breaking point and can provide you with the knowledge and experiences need to undertake that sort of project”.
Kolon Sports Jacket Designed by SeymourpowellSeymourpowell often work with users during the prototyping stage so that they can play with and discuss the merits of a tangible 3-dimensional item:
“We use model making to show finished designs to garner their opinions and inform us on the next design phases”.
Users Interacting With Prototypes at SeymourpowellAs well as this, Seymourpowell employ ethnographers to observe people in the spaces in which they use products and services:
“How someone thinks they use a product is quite different to how they actually use it, and by actually going and witnessing it for yourself you can identify behaviours people aren’t aware they have”.
A Seymourpowell Ethnographer at WorkThey also recruit researchers who study global shifts in factors like the economy and people’s attitude to environmental factors. Alex says this helps Seymourpowell identify:
“How and why the consumer’s behaviours are changing because of these factors and how they will change in the future.”
This information helps Seymourpowell’s designs remain successful in changing cultural climates. As well as collaborating with ethnographers and trend forecasters, Alex works with a host of other professionals involved in the product development cycle:
“It’s about making each of the touch points pleasurable and functional, whether it be the products itself, the packaging, the purchasing experience or the tone of voice that embodies the brand”.
So, to succeed, Alex has to be flexible in his work. He believes that Seymourpowell’s reputation for innovation comes in part from their multidisciplinary focus on users:
“Part of the reason we have come to have so many different disciplines under one roof is because we are able to unify lots of different parts of the overall user experience […] I think very few companies out there concentrate on all the touch points of a user experience”.
A Multidisciplinary Meeting at SeymourpowellAs Alex has hinted, Seymourpowell’s considerable investment in understanding and working with users is tied to the importance of the first Keyword in this series of articles—the need to create great experiences for consumers:
“The idea of a good user experience boils down to all the different touch points a user has with a product. On its most basic level any pain points when interacting with a product will be detrimental to the experience”.
This brings us back to our mysterious term: how do Seymourpowell define empathy. Alex says:
“Empathy is understanding people’s relationship with things on an emotional level.”
Developing an emotional connection can bring great rewards. Alex says that products are often designed and sold according to their function or specification, for example how fast a car goes or how many megabytes a computer has. This is only effective up to a point, so smart designers have begun to work differently:
“[we] are concentrating on what the product brings to the life of the user, and trying to cement an emotional attachment”.
Alex believes it’s difficult to give tips to help designers to be more empathic. The hardest challenge comes in measuring users’ feelings and relaying them in a way that makes sense to clients:
“It is easy to communicate that someone liked something, it is harder to communicate how much that person likes it. So for me often the challenge is being able to pick on what people say and how they say it, and then to be able to translate that into a story you can tell a client”.
Alex does however have some tips for working with users in focus groups. Think about where you intend to do your research:
“People tend to be more open in their own space where they are comfortable and in control.”
Feeling at Home…At Home.Stay alert and centered during your study. It will take a lot of time to organise a focus group and you might only get one chance:
“Make sure you are with your respondents at the point where the action happens. Emerge yourself into his/her world. Observe and question even the obvious. Often you will get the richest insights from observation.”
Once you have your information, you’ll need to filter it carefully before communicating with clients:
“we never say to a client that we should do something because a user has said so, our response is more to take influence from users and try and find new and interesting perspectives”.
In conclusion, Alex says don’t let working with users become design-by-committee:
“it is sometimes important to recognise and stick with your gut reactions, good designs can be made bad if too many people have too much of a say, remember that you are still leading the design process and research is meant to inspire rather than lead.”
There’s only so far you can get by imagining how users might interact with products or services you’re creating. It’s especially difficult to picture how someone who is of a very different age to you or is in a completely different state of health feels about your designs. Employers will look to see how you approach working with people. Don’t be embarrassed to practice ethnography with your friends and family. Plan your studies well. How might you film without making people feel self-conscious? It’s important to relay users’ stories succinctly in your portfolio. If you’re new to ethnography it will take you several attempts to get this right!
If you’re at university, fill in ethical clearance forms with time to spare. Thinking ahead will mean you’ll have plenty of research material to inform your designs and to talk about in interviews. It will also show employers that you’re organised and aware of what’s going in design right now—invaluable traits in any design workplace!
With markets flooded with products and services, creating great user experiences often means developing ‘authentic’ goods and ways of interacting. The next article in this series talks about the idea of authenticity.
Suggested homework Tasks for Students
1 - Please write about 3 brands/companies who have introduced an initiative that demonstrates empathy in the recent two or three years.
2 - Please choose a brand/company and suggest an initiative they could do that demonstrates empathy.
3 - With the brand/company chosen in task 2, suggest how you might hold a focus group to learn more about users' feelings towards the product or service.
If you enjoyed reading Design Keywords: Empathy, read more from the ARTS THREAD series on Design Keywords.
Aysar Ghassan teaches Automotive and Transport Design at Coventry University. He writes on 21st Century Design Philosophy and Design Education in international journals and conferences
REFERENCES
[1] Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy (2013) Empathy. Accessed: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/empathy/
[2] Allport, G. (1961) Pattern and Growth in Personality. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston
[3] Ghassan, A., and Blythe, M. (2013) On Legitimacy: Designer as Minor Scientist. In Mackay, W. E. (Ed) Proceedings of CHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp.2149-2158.
[4] Mattelmäki and Battarbee (2002) Empathy probes. In Proceedings of the Participatory Design Conference, T.Binder, J.Gregory, I.Wagner (Eds.), Malmo, Sweden, pp. 266.
[5] Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008, April) Empathy and experience in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 637- 646.
[6] Wright, P., & McCarthy, J. (2008) Empathy and experience in HCI. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York: ACM, pp. 640.