MacroEmpathy Definition As A Branch Of Design

As MacroEconomics is a branch of Economics...(In my opinion, totally fair, since designers foster empathy in their every day professional practice)

Did you know that Macroempathy doesn't exist in the dictionary?. Here is my definition!

Macroempathy: 

(from the Greek prefix makro- meaning "large" and empathy, MacroEmpathy is a branch of Design, fostering empathic performances, behaviors and decision-making  as a whole, rather than individually. This includes national, regional, and global initiatives).

Macroempathy is the global awareness of empathy at the highest levels of leadership and commitment, that leads to
a truly empathic and human-centered world.
World's empathy as a whole.  
Macroempathy is the next worldwide challenge to foster human understanding, wellness and justice.


See Macroeconomics

My conclusion: We need to elevate EMPATHY to the highest levels of global commitment and awareness: MACROEMPATHY. 

My thoughts about MacroEmpathy as a Design Thinker:


DT-in-action: Building Empathy
How Designers Foster Empathy
Thinking about Empathy
Design Thinking Attitude
Definition of Design Thinking

--We can do much better--

VIDEO: "Future by Design" explores Jacque Fresco’s world of the future.

Does Macroeconomy need Macroempathy and viceversa?

Delivering Unsolicited Meaning: First They Ignore You...And Then You Win

First they ignore you...by Mahatma Gandhi

What does usually happen when a design thinker delivers unsolicited meaning to an audience that is not prepared to understand nor listen to anything out of their system of knowledge?

First they ignore you, 

You'd probably find silence when sharing new ways of thinking about a situation and giving existing things new meaning.

Let's face it: Most of the innovations happen because mad designers and innovators are so stubborn! 

As a Design Thinking practitioner, I believe it's necessary to master a kind of passionate excitement about the "finding" of the idea or meaning, and the "fighting" for make it happen. It's a kind of "design thinking CORE" that, together with some others, make you say with security: 

“This is going to work”.This is the way to go. I know it.

Designers don't take a NO for an answer: It might seems at first they do, but it's just another designer's trick. It's a step back to reconsider a new strategy to try again, and again to make an idea HAPPEN. 

...Then they laugh at you, 

Too many professional still don´t know how to adapt to an ever-evolving business environment.

I understand that challenging the COMMON conceptual structure used in constructing theories is hard for both parts:

• As the "challenger", you better be ready to a "your analysis has no rigor", and a few pity faces feeling sorry for you.
• As the "challenged", please consider that rationality is necessary when analyzing any situation, but it's a part of the process of understanding, especially when trying to innovate and find meaning in a fuzzy problem.

This is why Design Thinkers are undergirded with hard-core analytical and a broader data gathering, that includes observation and sense making of society in general, people, technology, emotions and developing of insights. 

  

Most senior managers and CEOs would trust in strategic concepts and logical deductions based on their "logical data gathering": They use tools such as benchmarking, analytical data, etc., to arrive to solid conclusions. Executives construct theories using their rationality and their conceptual structure and culture. They come to conclusions that make a lot of sense for them because the sense they find is soooo similar of what they found last year, and the year before... only reinforces current knowledge and produces small improvements to the status quo. 

...Then they fight you, 

A Design Thinking approach challenges the 100% rational methods...and that is... scary?
For some analytical thinking professionals I guess it is. But it won't go away: It's a fact that there are experts (innovator, design thinkers, scientists) who are able to identify industry trends and important big ideas way ahead of the rest of the professionals and, even more important, designers know how to network with other "interpreters" – customers, suppliers, intermediaries, designers, artists - who understand and shape the markets they work in.

A new approach means redesign the business as they know it. I guess that is scary too.

...Then you win. 

The “This is going to work” is a fact...two years later, the average time leaders need to understand unsolicited meaning delivered by one of those mad designers two years before...the problem is that, sometimes, it's too late.

And just for the record: 

1. Labelling people doesn't work anymore
2. Better listen the “This is never going to work” 
3. Some leaders just never get it....
4. Any business can commit to successful design thinking

My inspirations to write this post:

Changing the Rules of Competition by  Radically Innovating What Things Mean, by Roberto Vergant
The Generation M Manifesto by Umair Haque
THE END OF BLAH BLAH BLAH – END THOSE USELESS MEETINGS FULL OF TALK By Alexander Osterwalder

Be irrationally optimistic Jeff Haden
A new era of meaning By Tim Leberecht 

Design Thinking starts at the top 

BY JOHN MIZIOLEK

Experience Design: Brands, Designers & People

Madrid, sept 2012

Designing emotions.

Designing for human complexity.

"What are the motivations of a designer?, Why designers always want more?, Why designers feel responsible for their audience?, Why designing appears to be so easy?, Is there anything in this world that is not designed?

I was asking myself these questions after a month of intensive and exhausting design work.

Experience Design is an multidisciplinar, synergistic, empathic, "humantific" and aesthetically activity that also requires a complex management of oneself and the expected and unexpected environment to create an emotional connection between everyone involved in the experience itself: The brand, the audience, the designer and the team.

Experience Designers need to understand and love their audience and need to be empathic from the heart: Empathy is a magical bond that can not be faked, otherwise there will be no emotional experience, just an exchange.

An Experience Designer also needs to developed managements capabilities with an strong focus on PR Communication skills:

Clients: Communicating complex ideas and insights to an audience/clients not familiar with creativity processes and creativity professionals.
Audience: Communication skills that would strenghten relationships between people that live the same experience and the brand

Designers need to control and manage the uncertainty of designing experiences for people as complex and unpredictable as oneself. 

Designers not only need to be able to deal with uncertainty: they need to enjoy it and include it as a vital part of their creative process. 

Experience designers have to be able to stay firm, confident about their critical thinking methodology applied in the process, and sure that the innovations that they have proposed are going to work out: They have to find out how to be able to transmit self-confidence in every decision. 

Designers have to learn how to feel comfortable working in an enviroment willing to transmit you their fears and insecurities in every stage of the process. It´s time to take control, it´s time to transmit your confidence, t's time to build trust.

Designers have to be confident leaders that create delusion in their teams; They have to pretend that what they do it´s not that difficult: If it would transcent to the rest of their team the real complexity of their management of unpredictability that involves any activity involving people's emotions, NO ONE WOULD TRY TO INNOVATE.


Management of complexity, unpredictability, and uncertainty inherent in any innovation or new model creation is what defines a XXI century designer.

When everything it's over, an experience designer reaches a nice sense of accomplishment, but onces again observes that nothing would have been possible without the participation and generosity of every person involved, and confirms that we better be humble or we will be anything at all.

And the designer moves on quickly to the next project and looks forward to the next challenge... By the way, I read that now Tim Brown of IDEO, talks about designing DNA .. . I am in! ;)

What drives designers?

It's all about people 

Why World Leaders Will Be Designers

Otto Neurath. (Vienna,1882 - Oxford,1945)

The answer is simple: There are no suitable words to explain the world...and new ways of understanding are needed... And all possible ways of understanding lead us to a holistic comprehensive view of humanity that involve visual communication and designers.

Facts are overwhelming but: Why is not happening yet?, What impediments do designers need to overcome to be taken seriously?

While reading Otto Neurath's "From Hieroglyphics to Isotype" (1943-45), I came to this quite simple yet visionary explanation:

"What are the origins of the critical and obstructive attitude shown by some people as soon as the question of pictures arises and especially if pictures are systematically used to covey information?

In the middle ages, from which our civilization has inherited so much, those who were literate were particularly word-minded while the lives of the illiterate masses are circumscribed by impressive buildings, sculptures and paintings. As literacy spread and became general and environment grew up in which there was a rather puritanical attitude towards pictures. British parliamentary papers very rarely contained pictorial material. Neither orator nor journalists, both men of words serving topical purposes, nor even writers of more permanent literature in prose or verse were in the habit of using illustrations, although these were sometimes added afterwards by other people. Perhaps it is this tendency which has led to lack of appreciation of informative pictures and to a feeling that any kind of verbal communication must, of necessity, be of higher order than communication by pictures.[...] I think that the day of "eye-consciousness" is rapidly approaching. Communication of knowledge through pictures will play an increasingly large part in the future."
In other words: 

This is a world ruled by exclusively word-minded leaders...turning into hollistic-minded by necessity.

Have to give in...



Otto Neurath was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was to flee his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle. During the 1920s, Neurath also became an ardent logical positivist and championed 'the scientific attitude'.

Design Thinking: Transforming Reality

los SAN. 44.00 ADC. Hallazgos de bastones de madera, punzones de hueso y ornamentos corporales. 

/ F. D'ERRICO / L. BACKWELL. El País

Human progress and Designers: Pioneers of Design Thinking.

One of the great paradoxes of paleontology is called the Great Leap, or sudden appearance in Europe around 40,000 years ago, advanced instruments typical of modern human creativity.

Design Thinking or "the process of a practical, creative resolution of problems or issues that looks for an improved future result" (Simon, 1969), is not a new resource as stated in various forums in Spain: It is a procedure that has existed since Humanity became a Global Community because some of its members-designers decided not to settled for what nature had given them and dared to "reform" and therefore, change the status quo, therefore, transform reality. How could I tear the skin of an animal .. .? How can I reach the fruit of the tree ...?

It all starts with a question: Why not ...?, What if I ...? How could we ...? what would happen if I...?

The artifacts belong to the San culture, one group of African Bushmen who, by all evidence, invented the modern culture of hunter-gatherers who quickly spread throughout the world.

Nothing has changed to these days (pattern nº1) : Designs that involve a real improvement in the lives of people spread at lightning speed and have the power to alter the known reality: Is the collective consciousness of survival that we all share that matches what is needed in each historical period? Why innovations don't usually match Leaders' mindset? (Pattern nº2).

In all human groups there is always someone who believes that reality can be improved, and a majority that prefer leaving everything just the way it is: and this is invariably a conflict situation (pattern nº3) which leads to these Designers to insist and insist on their idea or dream of improvement in many cases in a quite heroic way. It takes courage (pattern 4) to follow a inner impulse (instinct?) driven to change what is known and it takes courage too to accept these innovations because most of us are concerned about any kind of change: How am I going to react?, Where does it leads?, Will I have to change too? Staying just as we are gives us a false security based on the believe that the future is going to be just as the known past ...and that's not going to happen: Future cannot be decided, the future happens: Won't it be better create it, design it? At least we have to try.

There is always someone inventing new and better ways to get things done: Is it only the passion, an inner certainty impossible to avoid, is the urge to share the finding with the rest of the world?. The impetus of changing reality by inventing new ways of understanding has been punished throughout history as we all know: "How can you be so arrogant to think you can do something to change reality? How dare you question what most assume and approve? Do you think you are better than us?" (Pattern nº5). It's complicated to explain what leads some members of a community to strive, and why they insist on their idea or dream of improvement... Is there perhaps a mandatory interior map?. Albert Einstein said he desired simply to "experience the universe as a single significant whole." Nothing more, nothing less: see the big picture and reconcile the personal with the universal. This drive to fit all the nuances of life in a big puzzle is a hallmark of creativity.


Are empaths designers? Absolutely. One certainty is that any of us is that  unique nor special: we all are persons that need other persons. The designer needs to develop a sense of global community and also needs to develop an insight.


We are all creative, but there are people who see the world as an opportunity to continue creating and designing. It is a devotion. Creating is a goal in itself. If you also have a specific purpose, creativity and their own process, Design Thinking, becomes the more accurate tool for any challenge. 


There is always someone who identifies opportunities of improvement in reality that not everybody can see...and asks questions, What if ...? and challenge themselves, and set personal goals and commit to what they have planned. Is an inner impulse. And them again, the designer will have to insist and insist and fight against skepticism and overcome the impediments of their surroundings, their time, even their own family ...

My opinion? Possibly there is an internal search of the beauty of the result, meaning that the result is the fruit of the personal growth of all written so far and the tangible "proof"  that the "big picture" designed in a designer's imagination has been captured and implemented in reality, coupled with the certainty of having improved the community they belong.
The other vital impulse I will add is also entirely personal: the fight against oneself that involves overcoming patterns nº 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 ... 90 ... and keep on believing in yourself, despite all of them: this is the most exciting personal achievement that one can obtain.


Surely there is someone around you trying to improve what he/she sees and what he/she lives. Listen. Chances are that it will benefit you in the future.