#empathising

1st Meeting went well!

Milestone 1 in progress!

  “Empathy – Putting yourself in someone else’s shoes”, the most common phrase I have ever heard about Empathy. I think the phrase is incomplete or has much more to perceive than what we normally do. I have met with a situation where I have to question my understanding of this phrase.

Our commerce teacher is friendly and cheerful enough to accept jokes during the class and even loves to have…

In this movie a chauvinistic alpha-male advertising executive starts hearing women's thoughts. But before that happens, he tries to get inspired for an ad campaign for women, so tries empathising with them better:

Let's analyse the accuracy of the scene

"Walk in the shoes of your clients" is a great advice. No amount of desk research will enable you to empathise with your customer, unless you experience what they experience. Sometimes this means visiting a location, or trying out a part of a service. But sometimes it takes more sacrifice, as shown above.

Note that he is not just experiencing the products, but 'gets into character', by listening to music that appeals to a girl, etc. However, this is probably not the actual setting that these products would be used in!

Mel Gibson's character seems to just randomly buy beauty products, and on a whim start playing around with them. Instead, immersion in your constituent's experiences should be a planned part of your reseacrh.

"Never send a boy to do a man's job." Well, also, never send a man to do a woman's job. Especially not a chauvinistic man. If you have access to your customers, or the type of people you are designing for, include them in the project team.

Services are often experienced in a social context. While the character in the clip tried the product, he didnt't experience it in a social context. No matter how hard he tries, he will never feel the social expectations of wearing makeup or having smooth legs. Empathising has its limits.

A first experience will not be characteristic of an often-repeated task. The character was pretty bad at using these products, so he will only get some idea of the experience, not the full pictures. Interviews and other qualitative research techniques should accompany empathising.

You do not need to get drunk to do this type of immersion. Unless you are doing research for an anti-hangover cure...

Other aspects of service design shown in the clip:

Competitior reserach and benchmarking can be as important as understanding your own service.

Service design is not a 9-to-5 job. Ideas, inspiration, or opportunities for research may raise themselves at any time - stay open.

Believe it or not, drunk user testing is a thing. However, this is not used for empathy, but for really fool-proofing your service.

We can hold Junot Diaz to account – while still empathising with him | Chitra Ramaswamy | Life and style

Less than a month after Junot Díaz’s harrowing essay in The New Yorker, through which the writer revealed the deep lifelong impression of being raped as a baby, girls are accusing the Pulitzer prize-winner of misconduct. Writer Zinzi Clemmons, who confronted Díaz at an occasion in Sydney and later went public on Twitter, alleges he forcibly kissed her when she was a 26-year-old pupil. Others…

Ever since I was a small child I was always able to empathise with others because of my own physical problems, although it was expressed more inward than outward.

Empathy can be spontaneous, inherent and inbuilt for those of us with those qualities; but not everyone will have them, but even if it’s not something we have, it’s something we can learn to cultivate; we’ve just got to want to. It’s something that needs to continue to be nurtured if it is to work.

As easy as it is to have it, it’s easy to lose it when stress sets in. We need to have empathy and continue to have empathy if we are to have more understanding in our lives.