Before
empathy
Lucy Kimbell
Design Research Conference, IIT Chicago
October 2013
There is a trick some speakers
do, that tries to build empathy in their audience. They share a personal story.
They offer an intimate confession that gives the people listening a hook that
will spark their attention for the half an hour that follows. I’m not going to
use that trick.
I am however going to
try this one. Hands up if you use
empathy in your work. Hands up if you don’t. Will anyone here admit to not
being empathetic?
What I am going to do in
this talk – which is going to be more agonistic than the kind that starts with a
story – is explore what is going on in the fetishization of empathy within
design research over the past decade (see for example [1]).
To start off, I should say I am not anti-empathy, or anti-human centred design.
But what I am going to do is try to dig around a little to help us think about
what empathy is doing for us in design research, and what it is not doing.
There is one main reason
I’m doing this. In my work teaching MBAs, and advising entrepreneurs, I keep
coming across managers who have got the empathy bug. Apparently it’s the most valuable thing they teach at Harvard Business School.
These managers want to be empathetic. They want the services they are
responsible for to engage better with users. They think design thinking is the
way to make that happen. Quite often they think that they are pretty good at
doing empathy already so they don’t need designers to do it for them.
So with empathy now
being taken up by other fields, it’s worth looking at what is going on in
so-called empathetic design research. What comes with empathy? And what does it
ignore? Is it the thing that’s distinctive about design research?
A second reason is
that the strengths of a practice are often its weaknesses, so it’s useful to
step back and understand the issues and potential in a construct like empathy. However
this is not going to be a full-blown genealogy of empathy. But I will start
with what academics are supposed to do and go back to the literature.
Here’s the literature
I want to start with. Star Trek Next Generation (TNG) is not an academic literature
but it is a world which explores ideas and builds on them to create new ideas. I
propose that we can see Star Trek as a piece of design research - specifically, as an example of
what Ilpo Koskinen and colleagues in their book Design Research Through Practice call constructive design research.
Gene Roddenbery, the creator of Star Trek, and his colleagues, the TV studios,
the actors, the audiences, and all the specialists involved, together built a
world and put it to use in the sense of trying it out over several seasons. I’m
going to come back to this idea of constructivist design research at the end of
my talk.
To help us think about
empathy I want to enlist one of the characters from TNG, Deana Troi who has
the role of ship’s counselor on the USS Enterprise. Half human, half betazoid,
Counselor Troi has the capacity of being able to sense other people’s ideas and
feelings. In TNG they refer to this as telepathy, because she can do it at a
distance. But in fact what you see mostly in the seven series of TNG is
Counselor Troi having a face-to-face conversation with someone, or making
observations about people in front of her or a nearby planet. She doesn’t do a
lot of remote fieldwork – her practice is very interactive and it looks a lot
like some versions of empathy in design research.
Let’s have a closer look
at this practice. First of all, Counselor Troi is able to develop an
understanding about other lifeforms, and then create an analysis, which she
shares with her colleagues, often Captain Picard. Often she’s asked to do some
data gathering and form an opinion alongside Mr Data, the android, and Lieutenant Worf,
who’s a Klingon and claims to be very rational. In this clip, note how the male
officers are seated on one side of the table, while Conselor Troi and Dr
Krusher and the android (and so neither male nor female), Mr Data, are on the other.
(This and the following clips are used absolutely without permission.)
Against the backdrop of current conversations about big data versus what ethnographer Tricia Wang calls thick data, TNG looks ahead of its time by having Captain Picard invest his trust in Troi’s embodied analysis. In this clip we can see Troi’s perspective is taken seriously. She’s part of the officers’ discussion as the whole ship and crew at risk of being incorporated into the Borg. It’s her analysis that crystallises the challenge that the Borg represents to the Enterprise.
But as a part-betazoid,
or maybe it’s her human half, Counselor Troi is also able to experience some of
the feelings of the people she is studying. This is not always a pleasant
experience for her and is sometimes alarming for the people around her.
Counselor Troi is
aware that she or others will use that analysis to take action. The research
she does is not just for interest, but is part of the way the crew of the
Enterprise reach decisions about the course of action they should take.
One of the consequences
of being intimate with other lifeforms like this is that Counselor Troi has a
responsibility to speak up and challenge what’s going on. In this clip where
she’s temporarily in charge of the Enterprise, Troi is in the position of
taking sole responsibility for the action that will result from her empathetic
sensing.
Counselor Troi’s
capacities are brought home in an episode in which she loses her empathetic
powers. Despite all the knowledge at the disposal of a Starfleet sick bay, Dr
Krusher is unable to give Troi much help. Faced with the loss of her empathetic
core, Troi is horrified to imagine what life is going to be like without the
ability to empathise.
These clips from TNG
nicely present some of the issues that result from empathy in research for
design, New Product Development and innovation. My Oxford colleague Steve New and I have written a
recent paper (available here), which goes back to more conventional academic literatures and
tries to separate out the different strands that often get bundled together in
the term empathy. Here’s a typology of different aspects of empathy that draws
on this.
The first is what we
call cognitive empathy. This is the
empathy that comes from trying to put yourself inside the shoes of the user to
understand their world, their point of view. This is me imagining what would it
be like to be you. It’s ‘I want to understand you’. This is the core territory
of Counselor Troi – it’s key to her role on the Enterprise. Her job is to
understand what’s going on for other lifeforms, sometimes aliens the crew
encounters, sometimes the crew themselves.
This is central to
much design research, even before it got tagged with the term empathy. Depending
on the version of empathy you subscribe to, it might just be an act of
imagining a user. Or you might actually do some research. If you take seriously
the word ‘research’ then pretty soon you need to start getting clearer about
your research questions, your choice of methods, and your theoretical and methodological commitments. So in cognitive empathy is about recognising otherness, but on the one hand it might be in the domain of the
imagination, or on the other, it might involve research.
The second type is affective empathy. This is the kind of
empathy where you don’t just try to imagine the other person’s world and their
feelings. You have the feelings yourself. This is ‘I feel your pain’. It
involves emotional labour. And this is what we see Counselor Troi doing often
in Star Trek. In the sanitised, organised world of Starfleet, Troi sometimes
brings these emotions on to the bridge of the Enterprise.
If we look at design
research, this throws up the danger of designers becoming so focussed on the
emotions they are experiencing, they forget what they are doing it all for.
They are so busy having emotions, the project becomes about their experience
not the interpretation and analysis that is part of research.
A third type of
empathy is performative empathy.
This is where people who may or may not have empathetic capacities, present
themselves as having them. They look like they are empathetic, but it’s just to
achieve a goal. On Star Trek this is rarer – you’re either empathetic like Troi
and to some extent Picard, or you’re Ferengi, Klingon or just standard issue
male humanoid.
In design research, this
is the kind of empathy that comes when someone commissioning a project states
that the end result must be user-centred, and the process must be
participative. Yet curiously this manager is often unable to acknowledge the
results of doing research if they disagree with the solution they’ve
already decided on. This kind is a ‘me-too’ empathy. It throws up an interesting
issue, about how you can tell whether research is really empathetic or not. Or, is
something that appears to be empathy good enough?
Finally there’s anti-empathy. In psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen's
view, we owe much by way of scientific progress and technology to individuals
who operate with less than normal empathy. On Star Trek, there are several
characters who are anempathetic, notably the Ferengi and the Klingons. The
android character Mr Data also lacks empathy although he’s very polite. Baron-Cohen says that empathy
deficiency can lead to evil, but it can also be associated with a propensity
for systematization and quantification. So he sees a positive connection
between mathematics, engineering and Asperger's syndrome.
In design research
terms, this is the stance in which designers don’t do much imagining of users,
because they don’t need to. This is ‘sod the user’. The negative impact of this
is all the appalling designs we have to use when we interact with organisations
and systems.
If we take this
simplified typology, empathy is not singular. It’s complex, contradictory and
it hides the power plays involved in studying and interpreting what goes on in
the world and the intended and unintended consequences that follow. So what is
my problem with empathy? It’s not so much a problem with empathy, as much as
problem with current accounts of empathy.
The first issue is
that what we hear described as empathy often presents it as an individual
quality. On the one hand, there’s an emphasis
on sensitivity to others. Counselor Troi is the emblematic empath, which is
apparently linked to genetic traits she inherited from her betazoid mother, and
possibly to her cleavage or the clothes she wears. But on the other, Troi’s
sensibilities and skills exist within a collective world. She’s part of an
organisational structure within Starfleet. She has a job to do, and a rank, and
it is through her interactions with Picard giving her a seat at the table, and her other colleagues that her
cognitive and affective empathy comes into mattering - part of the apparatus around her empathy.
If we were to borrow
concepts from Science and Technology Studies, we could say that Troi’s empathy
is not a stand-alone quality, with clear boundaries, that exists outside the
object of study, which is waiting to be investigated. Rather, this view sees empathy
as constituted through intra-actions with the structures, reward systems and
behaviours on board the Enterprise, the habits she picks up and the routines
she takes part in. This version of empathy sees it as a collective
accomplishment.
The second issue I
have is, why empathy now? How is it
that technology giants are investing in public narratives about empathy? Or
governments redesigning public services, at exactly the same point their
political legitimacy is low as hardly anyone bothers to vote, and their
interest in people’s experiences coincides with cutting costs and getting
people to deliver things themselves? There’s the usual argument that all organisations
have to innovate to create new markets to still be players in five years’ time.
But dig deeper, and it begs a question about how the circulations of global
capital have spawned a generation of people who want to render experiences
visible in a world of dematerialised interactions. Someone else’s second-hand
thoughts and feelings can be a powerful challenge to the ebbs and flows of
immaterial capital. Strong emotion is often a starting point for action. It
drives people to activism, to bringing about change. But too much focus on all
the emotion can provide a distraction from the actual power relations. So there
is a danger in being so caught up in the detail of the experience and ignoring
the issues they are part of.
A third issue with
empathy is what it does to design
research. Having made a distinction between affective and cognitive
empathy, my colleague Steve New and I also make a distinction in our paper between a
rational version of consultancy and an aesthetic version. Although this is
crude, this delineates some of the differences between the modes of consultancy
that exist as design research, and the mode that is business consulting. An
even cruder version would say that on the right-hand side, where design
research is located, are the nice guys. They care about users and their worlds,
really want to understand and engage with them, and have their feelings too.
But over there in the other quadrant is where the clever guys operate. They may
have an empathetic relationship with their client, but they pretty much try to
fit the client’s problem into a universe of problems with which they are
familiar. On an individual level it’s clear there are people who can flip
between these modes. The more interesting discussion is about whether
organisations have to be in only one of these spaces. So does design research
want to be operating in the domain it’s currently in, being nice guys, or does
it want to be over on the left hand side with the clever guys?
A final issue is that
empathy often looks like a dumbed-down version of ethnographically-informed
research. The danger here is that researchers think that the data “out there”
is the truth waiting to be discovered and interpreted. This approach – based in
Positivist science – gives researchers the idea that they are neutral carriers
of that data back from the field to the sites where decisions are made.
Crucially, this
ignores what ethnographers trained in anthropology call reflexivity.
Ethnographers are attentive to how they as researchers are brought into
relation with the object of study. Instead of trying to walk an uncomfortable
path between objective truth or subjective reality, ethnographers have
developed an understanding that their work is constructivist. This means they
pay attention to how they include and exclude different data, and their work of
interpretation.
I think there are
other ways to do design research that avoids these problems. This approach harnesses some
of the resources that empathy in its different variants brings, but does
something slightly different and which is part of existing traditions in design
research.
Firstly, if we go back
to the bridge of the Enterprise, what Troi’s practice does, and what some
design research does, is expand the ontology of stakeholders and actors to increase the variance. What
that means is that in constructivist design research, a diverse group of people
and things are brought into relation with one another. Counselor Troi picks up
what other lifeforms are thinking and feeling, and her analysis of this then
changes what becomes possible for the Enterprise’s crew. This kind of design research
changes what an issue is made up of. It involves creating not just artefacts or
representations of research findings, but also new configurations of people and
things, which involve new symbolic structures, behaviours and scripts and new value relations being formed. It
doesn’t start with a given world, but creates a trajectory for a different one.
It draws things together into new combinations and this is an active practice
of including some things and excluding others.
Secondly, after Troi
has made her analysis and other colleagues have given theirs, this prompt
questions about whose data is right, whose feelings, whose worldviews, or whose
interpretations, matter more. Constructivist design research involves creating contestable boundary objects [3]. It sets up these
differences as a problematic to be worked through rather than ignoring the
power plays in any project or organisation. Done well, it draws attention to the
unintended consequences of decisions and the temporalities over which these
come into play. It helps participants such as the people we call users, staff,
managers, and clients help make sense of and situate themselves inside these configurations, and surfaces disagreements about them.
And thirdly, this kind
of design research prompts the researcher to investigate how to situate herself
in the work. It offers what anthropologist Lucy Suchman calls located accountabilities. If we look at what happens with Troi, by accessing these
other lifeforms’ worlds, Troi becomes mutually accountable to them. By making
public these accounts and her own affective empathy, Troi then involves other
crew members, resulting in an expanded set of accountabilities for the
Enterprise. Constructivist design research helps participants become visible
and accountable to one another as actors within these unfolding configurations.
If these issues I have
outlined matter, then it is time to start talking differently about the thing
that is currently called empathy.
This involves a move
away from thinking of empathy as an individual trait, towards a collective
capacity. The opportunity is to create a version of empathy that recognises its
potential to constitute new configurations of people and things. So empathy
becomes less about individual sensibility. And more about organisation design,
culture, routines, habits, behaviours, reward systems, roles, and core assumptions about the
nature of change and agency.
In closing, I want to
leave you with some questions to pose next time you reach for empathy to
differentiate you from other kinds of researcher. Remember Troi. But don’t
focus on her Starfleet suit, or her emotional sensitivity.
Before you reach for
empathy, ask where are you located and to whom and what are you accountable? All
those emotions you are picking up, or experiencing yourself – what are they
stopping you paying attention to? What do you get out of being a nice guy? What
would happen if you stopped being a nice guy?
[1] See for example http://www.sap.com/campaigns/2013_05_design_thinking/index.epx
[2] http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/05/empathy-the-most-valuable-thing-they-t/
[3] Contestable boundary objects is not quite the right term but see also Noortje Marres (2005) Issues spark a public into being: A key but often forgotten point of the Lippmann-Dewey debate. In B. Latour and P. Weibel (Eds.) Making Things Public. Karlsruhe/Cambridge (MA): ZKM/MIT Press, and Carl di Salvo (2012 Adversarial Design. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
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