Design Thinking-in-action 2013: Building Empathy

Look at the BIG PICTURE...What do you see?

 

A beautiful, overwhelming, never-ending scenario full of...dots. And you share one of those dots with millions of others like you. Are you feeling a little overwhelmed?. Who are you? Who is with you? What do you want to accomplish? Billions of people feel just the same.

The BIG PICTURE above holds together because of known and unknown connections among dots...

What if the so called "flow" is about stepping from one dot to another? A never ending effort to connect and let the world connect back to you? A Design Thinking Attitude:

(Check out My "Thrownness Theory" applied to Design Thinking:  Think-in-order-to-act  versus think to Think-some-more)

So this year, Why don't you think about re-designing your life by building empathy from within and finding ways of connecting with others?

"As a style of thinking, Design Thinking is generally considered the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context". (Wikipedia definition)

Conquer this year the feeling of creation: When was the last time you created anything? 

Step out of your box and let yourself be inspired by people: Build on others ideas and let other build on yours. ...Creating is awesome, but doing it with others is even better.

Build empathy by connecting dots and create community:

"The broader one’s understanding of the human experience, the better designs we will have.” – Steve Jobs

Design your life!

Inspiration to write this post:

VIDEO:

"How to design breakthrough inventions"

Global firm IDEO incorporates human behavior into product design by David Kelley.

Thinking About Empathy (1)

 

"I know the joy of fishes in the river through my own joy, as I go walking along the same river."
Chuang Tzu

I'm not participating much in my favorite Groups lately: Besides my regular work, I'm quite busy thinking about empathy. It might sound freaky, it's ok: I'm a nerd. I admit it. The thing is that I'm confused and need answers to my questions.

Suddenly, everyone talks about empathy. It feels almost as a new capability that never existed before...a brand new tool of understanding and innovate...


There are workshops that would teach you how to develop empathy, and conferences, books, and talks...and Empathy Tools that would use simulation devices to gain first-hand insights into particular problem related to customers that can can prompt an empathic understanding of users in a role playing situation...Are we learning a kind of functional Empathy? 
In other words: 

Are we learning to be empathic just to understand better our clients? Do we need to master empathy just to succeed in our professions? A product-oriented-empathy?

I don´t get it. Or maybe I do:

This obsession with mastering empathy is, at the end, another trick to engage customers back to the track? In other words, are we all faking empathy? 

I don't know. 


Empathy as the ability to understand what someone is feeling, is the essence of human kind: It is what differences us from animals. Being empathic is inherent to all of us. So let's say than being empathic is being human, isn't it?

Does it mean that we have been acting in our professions in a unhuman way till now? I mean: This "discovering" of empathy by  business and companies... is it just the evidence of our previous dehumanized procedures? Have we been living two lives: the dehumanized one at work, and the empathic one in our personal life? How can one be empathic a few a hours a day and then...choose not to? 

I don't think so. Empathy it's not only about understanding: It's about emotion.
The inner emotion of recognizing a common link, a common ground with another human being. Being one with others. Recognizing yourself in others. Real communication. What Einstein wanted to achieved, simply to "experience the universe as a single significant whole." This is possible through real empathy. 
 

How can you understand what anybody else feels if you don't understand your own self? Does it mean that empathy need to be mastered through personal experience and awareness?

How can you understand joy, if you have never felt it?

We need outsiders into our business and economic establishment.

In my opinion -let's say my theory- there are people that
dive deep into LIFE (the life that occurs outside an office), experiencing other worlds in first hand and learn awareness and meaningful insights completely out of our reach.


This people are almost impossible to find in a business and economy related world because, as we all know, we -professionals- are surrounded by other professionals like ourselves working, in similars environments since our graduation, with lives quite identical to ours, and so are our friends...
It takes a lot of effort and dedication to build a successful career... so most of successful professionals, CEOs and world leaders haven't had had the opportunity to know "other worlds" besides their similar own world.

Everyone talks -in our design and business context- about innovation and mastering empathy...I believe that we need to include outsiders to our business world: Empathic-outsiders to help us with their meaningful, real-life insights.

Maybe real innovation would be to permit the rest of the world in our little business world. 
And see what happens...

(Design thinking and design process, by the way)

Image courtesy of NOAA

What does a Designer do in 2012?

What is the difference between a 2012 designer and an old fashion designer?

a) The context has changed.We all live in constant transformation.
b) The universal language is a visual language. Visual mental mapping is required to visualice the future and to understand almost anything.
c) This is the century of the people: this is a persons' world
d) We are pragmatic and creative. At the same time.

Why Design Thinking is capable of transforming without disruption?

a) Design Thinking is the process of reflective thinking by which the designer faces each challenge by creating, transforming and constant adapting to the context and focusing in problem solving.
b) Visual communication is the language of our profession. Metaphorical language: complete conexion between rational and intuitive understanding.
c) We understand the world we live in because we are in contact with people: Designers listen and question. We are partners.
d) Capable of building new understandings to innovate

Where does a designer lead to in 2012?

a) The institutions and companies are conservative and want to remain that way, but the reality is another. Designers assume the transformation required and facilitate evolving solutions.
b) No more business like relationships with people-target. Designer has been working for decades building relationships with people by creating and designing meaningful experiences. Connecting feelings.
c) Business Designers create sustainable and innovative institutions: create new systems and discard old structures.

2012: Working towards a Sustainable Design.

Age of Imaginative Rationality

I`ve already explained my ideas about creativity, designers and marketing and how new technologies have changed us. 

I won't insist but I will add, as McLuhan reminds us, "Control over change would seem to consist in moving not with it but ahead of it. Anticipation gives the power to deflect and control force".

The Imaginative Rationality or a set of knowledge that seeks to establish rational and imaginative principles that organize and guide the knowledge of reality and the meaning of human action, is IN MY OPINION the only way to understand the world we live in. And most important: the only way to predict what is COMING NEXT.

Competences needed: Methodical reflexion of reality that unites reason and imagination. Building up ideas that are partially based on rational/intuitive/aesthetic/human-centered thinking. Holistic understanding. And the most important: CONNECTING everything.

Understanding the world we live in and predicting what is COMING NEXT. This is what we need right now, isn't it? 

photo by Wikimedia Commons