Social design applies design methodologies and mindsets to solve social and community problems. This mindset is underpinned by empathy and a human-centred approach, where human needs are the highest priority for the design team and stakeholders. In his book "Change by Design," Tim Brown describes empathy as "the mental habit that moves us beyond thinking of people as laboratory rats or standard deviations." Empathic design aims to build an emotional relationship between end users and the design by better understanding the user experience and users' needs from the early stages of the social design project.
Design thinking models, such as the Double Diamond Design Thinking, play a crucial role in utilising this mindset during the social design process by focusing on understanding the problem through comprehensive problem framing and involving the user at the heart of the process from the early stage through to prototype testing and evaluation.
What is Empathic Design?
Empathic design is an approach in the design thinking process that prioritises user-centred design . But as the name implies, it focuses on the emotional relationship between the user and the product or the service. A good social design example that reflects empathetic design is the Hippo Water Roller, a rollable water tank that helps women and children transfer water over long distances without carrying it, reducing the suffering of carrying water for 2 to 10 km on a daily basis.
Unlike the old mindset in traditional market research, to achieve empathic design, we need a design thinking mindset to understand user needs through ideation, prototyping, and building empathy maps to reflect these needs in the final product (checkWhat is Kano Model Analysis? And How to Conduct it?).
The Benefits of Empathic Design
Beyond its simple aim of creating an emotional relationship between the consumer and the product, empathic design can help companies in multiple disciplines. Conducting the proper research to target empathic design can build this connection and help a company innovate new products or solutions for problems the user never asked for, or thought could be solved. For some products, innovation does not require creating a new product but improving an existing one to meet current consumer needs. From a marketing context, empathic design can help acquire market segments by exploring the unexpected and unmet needs of the end consumer and ensuring diversity and user inclusion.
The Advantages of Empathic Design in Social Design
Beyond its simple aim of creating an emotional relationship between people and social design, whether it is a product, service, or both. Empathic design can help organisations in multiple ways, especially when it is integrated with the design thinking process. These advantages include:
- Understand hidden or unmet needs: Through in-depth design research, the team can identify pain points in the user experience and address these unmet needs with the appropriate solutions.
- Include marginalised voices: Empathetic design helps the team achieve inclusive design by involving minorities and other marginalised user segments throughout the design process, ensuring their voices are heard and their problems are addressed.
- Build trust with communities: Through this close connection with the community, they trust the team which leads to mutual benefits and better solving problems.
- Avoid designing solely on assumptions: When users are included in the design process, there is no place for wrong assumptions that can create a disconnect between user needs and the social design outcome.
While empathetic design helps understand users' deep personal and social needs, it contributes to building a realistic idea of what the solution can be to address design problems. The team can adopt several tools to achieve this goal, such as SCAMPER, 5 Whys, Paul-Elder Critical Thinking, and Disney Creative Strategy.
Conducting proper research to target empathetic design can build this connection and help a company innovate new products or solutions for problems the user never asked for, or thought could not be solved. For some products, innovation does not require creating a new product but improving an existing one to meet current consumer needs.
How to achieve Empathic Design?
While designers should be good at understanding the problems or projects at hand, empathetic design methodologies focus even more on understanding the end user's needs, including undiscovered ones. This understanding can be achieved through several methods, including asking questions about user behaviour. As the empathic design is closely related to human-centred design, similar questions can be asked in both approaches. To achieve a human-centred design approach, three main questions could be asked, according to The Golden Circle concept discussed by Thomas and McDonagh in their research, "Empathic Design: Research Strategies," published in The Australasian Medical Journal:
- Why are we achieving this specific goal?
- How can we accomplish this goal?
- What is the outcome after achieving this goal?
One of the companies that applied empathic design with human needs in mind was Danone. In 1996, Danone partnered with Grameen to build a yoghurt manufacturing plant in the Bogra District of Bangladesh. The project aimed to help supplement Bangladeshi children's dietary deficiencies (addressing the why). Building this plant and recruiting community-wide support for its operation was the method to achieve this goal (addressing the how). The project's outcome is clearly evident in employees' pride over their positive impact on other people. This example and similar experiences were discussed further by Battarbee, Suri, and Howard in their IDEO paper, "Empathy on the Edge."
This experience reflects positively on the community and the organisation; Danone project manager Marie Soubeiran noted the impact "has transformed Danone culturally."
Empathic design requires designers to put themselves in the shoes of end users and consider what they need and what results will be produced, as described in the Empathy on The Edge (PDF) published by the IDEO: "People who cannot temporarily let go of their role or status or set aside their expertise or opinion will fail to empathise with others who have conflicting thoughts, experiences, or mental models."
Empathic Design Methods for Social Design
To achieve empathy in social design, the right tools should be used to capture the user experience in its context of use or real environment, enabling the design solution to integrate with their current lives. Therefore, the design research methods should be chosen to achieve this goal. Examples of these tools include:
- Ethnographic observation
- Interviews
- Empathy mapping
- Participatory workshops
- Co-design sessions
- Journey mapping
These tools ensure user involvement in the social design process. These tools rely on qualitative data to capture user experience. Then, the design team can use thematic analysis to identify key themes that reflect the user experience.
Can AI be Used to Achieve Empathic and Social Design?
AI has become an integrated tool for several design disciplines. The question is, can AI be used to achieve empathy in social design projects? This is a bit of a tricky answer as AI can be a useful tool for designers to conduct design research, analyse data and prototype solutions. However, AI can be risky from several points of view:
- Involvement of real users: The answers AI provides are based on synthetic data aggregated from existing sources, leaving no room for users’ unique voices to describe their very specific unmet needs.
- Bias: One major challenge of using AI in social design is that it inherits biases from its training data, which can lead to biased outcomes, such as racist content or prejudice against a specific population.
- Hallucination: AI can introduce wrong information. So, designers should be careful when using AI, ensuring they supervise the results and validate them.
- Ethics and responsible design: Designers should be careful about adding user data to AI models, as this data can be used to train the AI to provide future answers, potentially resulting in a data breach. To protect user data, designers should be careful about which data they input into AI prompts.
Conclusion
Empathic design bridges the wide gap between designers and end users, enabling designers to put themselves in end users' shoes. This helps better understand people’s needs and opens new marketing opportunities. Applying design empathy requires methodologies that involve asking questions and understanding the end user.
Bibliography
Empathy on the Edge PDF (2014) by Battarbee K., Suri J., and Howard S. (IDEO)
Change by Design (2014) by Brown, T. (IDEO)
Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design by Leonard D. and Jeffrey R. (Harvard Business Review)
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