ABSTRACT
Design researchers are increasingly promoting the development and utilization of empathy within design. However, there is a limited body of knowledge on how empathy operates in the world of design, particularly within professional contexts. In this study, we sought to understand how empathy manifests within an industrial design context by observing how a team of professional designers delivered and reflected on two co-creation workshops. We used discourse analysis as our guiding methodology, which directed our attention to micro-level discourses, or the specific words and phrases that designers used, along with macro-level Discourses, or the broader social, political, and environmental forces that deterred or encouraged designers to empathize with users.
We developed five themes from this analysis. First, the designers created and refined figured worlds, or user-assumptions, as a means to generalize from users to broader user groups and vice versa. Second, the designers utilized a series of empathic techniques to attempt to develop an empathically accurate understanding of the users. Third, designers developed personas from individual users to create idealized versions of their target user demographic. Fourth, through a telephone game of sorts, where the designers communicated their user-centric understanding to higher-ups in the company who in turn communicated with higher ups, the likelihood of holistic user understanding was potentially diminished. Lastly, the designers, constrained by corporate demands, faced the tension of “conquesting” clientele versus establishing meaningful concern for users. We describe these results and their implications for future design research and practice.
