Integrative Empathy for Design: From Mindset to Practice

Source: Couleur/Pixabay

Design thinking offers hope and holds promise for designing significant change[1]. In a world fraught with misunderstanding and habitual polarization, innovation leading to a more humane world is tempting.

Empathy is one of seven key mindsets described by the global design company Ideo to guide human-centered design. With empathy, you put yourself in the shoes of the person you design for and understand their lives. Consequently, you will be better equipped to design innovative solutions to their challenges.

Yes, indeed, empathy as a mindset is essential. But how do you ensure that it doesn’t just stay there in the back of your mind? How do you guarantee that it guides your intentions and moves your actions?

While much is written about the importance of empathy in design, people struggle to find actual instructions on how to do it. In this blog post, we introduce integrative empathy as a science-informed practice with actionable and verifiable tools. When applied in design, it deepens innovation and enables creative teamwork.

Integrative empathy throughout the design process

The practice of empathy is useful throughout the design process. Applied skillfully, it offers capacities to guide all interpersonal interactions.

Empathy is explicitly advocated for researching user needs in most design traditions. It is often used to describe the research or inquiry phase of the design process. However, truly human-centered design should apply empathy throughout. It is just as important to create and maintain multidisciplinary teams as it is to check in while ideating and implementing prototypes.

Integrative empathy is a five-layered practice:

• Use self-empathy to cultivate emotional awareness and detect bias.
• Connect with kinesthetic empathy.
• Build understanding with reflective empathy.
• Diversify perspectives with imaginative empathy.
• Gather insights with empathic creativity.

Employing self-empathy to cultivate emotional awareness and detect bias

All empathy starts with self-empathy. If you don’t first notice, recognize, and work with yourself, you are likely to confuse your observations of others with your own biases and assumptions.

In self-empathy, the empathizer attends to their own experience to gain awareness and understanding of their ongoing inner state. This brings self-awareness to thoughts and feelings as well as personal assumptions and biases. It also aids the suspension of judgment. It helps people to distinguish the experiences of self and others and to avoid common pitfalls of directing towards a preconceived outcome.

In self-empathy, you learn to be comfortable with the expression of emotions while maintaining neutral emotionality yourself. Emotion informs us about our embodied inner state and how to respond in different circumstances. Being comfortable with the expression of emotions, rather than avoiding them altogether, enriches your understanding of others.

Biases and assumptions will determine outcomes if not explicitly addressed. When working with empathy, designers are frequently instructed to leave their biases behind and assume a beginner's mindset. This is not possible. Biases and assumptions are complex and deeply embedded in our embodied habits. Consequently, they are not accessible to superficial reflection. Yet, with self-empathy, you are, with practice, able to notice, recognize, and work with your bias and deepen empathic insights.

Designers readily bring awareness to common biases. But those involving personal anxieties are insidious and more likely to be overlooked. We often see that performance doubt, confirmation bias, and anxiety about time constraints cause designers to direct outcomes. The practice of self-empathy, as an ongoing habit, helps guard against these problems.

Connecting with kinesthetic empathy

Kinesthetic empathy helps you to connect with others and brings awareness to how people influence each other nonverbally. It is the capacity to participate in somebody’s sensory experience of thought or emotion through movement.

This is where empathy is so much more than a mindset or mental process. While thought about with the mind, it is experienced and expressed with the body, specifically in the muscles, heart, and nervous system[2]. With kinesthetic empathy, you connect to and embody previously unknown client experiences and sensations.

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In kinesthetic empathy, you learn observation skills. You become more aware of others' movements or sensory experiences as they are expressed through body language and movement. This is an essential skill when immersing yourself in the world of others.

We see so many projects flounder due to subtle, undermining group dynamics. The early signs are often visible but overlooked until they become overwhelming. In kinesthetic empathy, you learn to notice early signs and to create group cohesion using physicality rather than thought.

Building understanding with reflective empathy

Reflective empathy is applied to clarify problems and create mutual understanding through empathic listening. Truly hearing what another person means to say is more than directing one’s ears toward them.

With empathic listening, you attentively lean into the other, with a willingness to be changed by what you hear. You direct your full attention to all that the speaker is saying, gesturing, and implying. Literal and advanced empathic listening is applied in interviews and team sessions.

We frequently hear instructions to ask open-ended questions in interviews. We think, however, that questions steer people in a particular direction, closing off other directions. We, therefore, advise limiting all questions. Instead, try inviting thoughts, feelings, and experiences about a particular topic. Then reflect back on what you hear. When your interviewee hears you reflect back on what they said, they will notice and fill in the gaps themselves. They will also feel encouraged to elaborate.

Habitual power dynamics and conflicts of interest form in human interactions and need to be addressed. Difficult dynamics are common in teams. Team members tend to listen without actively hearing what others are saying. The result is a lack of understanding between disciplines as well as a lack of cohesion.

Empathic listening, when applied in teams, encourages self-expression, understanding, and exploration of everyone's thoughts.

Diversifying perspectives with imaginative empathy

Imaginative empathy uses imagination and as-if acting to gain an experience of the perspectives of others. It guides designers to explore a problem from multiple perspectives.

Design empathy is described as being "sensitive to another person’s feelings and thoughts without having had the same experience" [3]. When empathizing, one often asks the question: “How would I experience this person’s situation?” One needs to be cautious of this "imagined-self" perspective. It does not necessarily provide valuable insights into the experiences of others.

The real empathic question is: “What is it like for the other to be in their situation?” This is an "imagine-other" perspective. When fully embodied through, for instance, guided as-if acting, it aids innovation in empathy maps and personas. It is also a check to the limits of one’s empathic accuracy [4].

In imaginative empathy, you learn skills to understand, acknowledge the value of, and encourage diversity. This includes the skills to suspend judgment and explore the views of others free from your own projections, values, norms, and opinions.

Gather insights with empathic creativity

Empathic creativity gathers insights into a guide-to-action. Empathic creativity is a direct result of previous empathic practices. At any time during the design process, the designer can identify significant moments of insight. "Significant" because they are particularly intense, meaningful, and memorable. They signify the moment when one realizes something is important. They spur empathic action: They energize people to pick up on what is happening and follow through, enabling designers to identify important data for prototyping and keep everyone on board during the design process.

In empathic creativity, you learn to discern significant insights, learnings, and moments to integrate into the design process.