- Week 8 -
Empathy, Stakeholders & Design Research Methods
I feel this week’s reading, The Promise of Empathy, points to a simple but essential truth for designers: if we claim inclusion, the people we’re “including” must be present as partners with real authority. It’s useful to try stepping into a demographic’s shoes to ballpark an initial direction, but even for common, widely used software, services, and products, we still need clear stages for user feedback to steer the work. If we’re building for other people, they should test, give feedback, and our decisions should be based on what they say.
In today’s industry, many companies call themselves inclusive while doing the bare minimum to sit on the “morally good” side. Until we give these groups real resources and decision-making power in the design and production of solutions for them, we won’t be truly inclusive.
I really appreciated Cultural Probes; it reframes research as more of a conversation rather than an extraction. The packages invited people to share on their own terms! I loved that. What came back isn’t just data you can quantify and get a cold result for the following step or solution; rather, it gives some kind of living texture to design with. We are not machines; we are humans, each with our own layers of cultural, economic, society-molding biases, and we change all the time. I don’t think analysis of our necessities should be based on pure numbers we then make graphs with in Python—that’s not enough. This type of conversation, I feel is extraordinary and definitely should be a must-have in many projects.
Readings:
- The Promise of Empathy: Design, Disability, and Knowing the “Other” by Daniela K. Rosner
- Gaver, Dunne and Pacenti, Cultural Probes
- Hanington & Martin, Universal Methods of Design (browse selection)
Videos:
- The Importance of People (NYU Stream, Zoom Recording)
- Cultural Probes (NYU Stream, Zoom Recording)