The whole of design thinking/human-centered design/service design is built on the foundation of empathy: we’re taught that we must take our first step in any change initiative by engaging with people: stakeholders, customers, citizens, co-workers. We do that through empathy work. In the end, the only way we can evaluate whether we’ve delivered any positive significant change is by measuring the value we’ve delivered. We also do that through empathy.
So, what’s the problem? For a while now I’ve observed how many organizations wallow in the insights, quotes and descriptions of people delivered in the empathy work. It’s not so much that they are interested in what other people experience, even if it directly impacts their work. It’s rather that they relish, indulge, and luxuriate in their own personal and group ability to feel what someone else is feeling.
“We really feel like we know our customers.”
“So much of what I’ve heard is exactly what I feel.”
“It feels like we really have our finger on the pulse of our users.”
These are just some of the direct quotes I hear. I’ve started calling this Empathy Porn since the main benefit of this exercise seems to be self-fulfillment, a brief personal experience of ecstasy at one’s own ability to feel something besides one’s own feelings. It even becomes a group exercise, where the group pats itself on the back and touts the group’s ability to feel, together.
What I also see is that too many design and innovation initiatives start and end with empathy reports, we call these Needs Assessments or Insight Reports, which never lead to any significant change or actions. They simply gather digital dust in some folder on some server. I think this is a result of empathy porn.
It reminds me of another word: emoting. And when I see this happen, I always think about an old Star Trek episode: The Empath.
Merriam Webster defines empathy as:
“the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner.”
Notice my italics: understanding, awareness and sensitivity of someone else’s experience. The experience part comes last.
I would suggest a more pointed definition of empathy as it relates to design, innovation, and change:
Empathy — understanding another person’s experience in order to take action to alleviate or improve that experience.
We empathize as a means to an end. In and of itself it should never be the end. If your needs assessment or insight reports evoke lots of oohs and aahs and feelings only to be put on the digital shelf, you haven’t really empathized. You’ve engaged in empathy porn.
Many people call this idea of acting on empathy as compassion. Maybe we need to swap out our descriptions in the design and innovation process. I say this as someone who named his business on this trait: Empatico.
Let’s also be clear: the way psychologists and other behavioral specialists use the term Empathy is NOT how we as designers and innovators need to use it. In the former’s work, it’s enough, critical even, to understand and feel another’s pain without directly acting on it. It’s enough that people feel that they can share their burdens with another person. But we are not therapists — we are here to help make change.
Empathy porn is about congratulating oneself on the ability to feel something else. Design and innovation are about creating something new that provides value to another person. We can’t do that without empathizing, and we need to need to more of it, but it needs to be a productive experience, not a self-indulgent one.
If you’re not acting on the empathy work you do with customers, stakeholders, citizens, and co-workers, you’re probably engaging in empathy porn. And you need to clean that up.
