Empathic design: A brief look at a designer's approach

Empathic Design can be seen as the designer using empathy throughout the Design process. Empathy fully comprehends the object of contemplation through entering one’s personality into it. Through enhancing communication within a design team, empathy can be shown between the designer and user, project manager, tool maker, and factory assemblers. Empathic Design is a research model, which when considered within Human Centered Design and employed alongside the Design Methods structure can ensure innovative design solutions which capture the real needs of users. By addressing the problem of our throwaway society at the forefront of the design process we can start to eliminate the production of products which are discarded early on in their product life, due to a real need not being met. This paper explores how designers can build Empathic Design through understanding people. It examines Empathic Design with regards to the need of designers to develop an interdependent relationship with the user in order to build empathy into products. The author outlines an approach designers can utilise, using methods and techniques that can be implemented into the formative stages of the design process to push innovation. Two case studies involving products from leading businesses, are analysed to show the outcome of employing empathic methods. The result is a product that goes beyond the user’s expectations and contains the user’s values, whilst ensuring that the product has been produced to address a relevant need. Our environment can surely only benefit from designer’s adopting an empathic approach when used alongside eco-design and tailoring design solutions to the broader sustainability considerations in product development.