Playpump is an example of a solution that didn’t fully understand the user. Good intention isn’t enough, you need to put in the hard work of making a product that works for your user. For the Playpump creators, they raised $16.4 million from prestigious foundations and persons including Jay-Z and the Clinton Foundation. It seemed creative and different.

However, once Playpumps were being installed, they largely sat around unused. Kids didn’t want to play on it because it had too much resistance, and mothers would end up having to push the Playpump, which was harder to pump water than previous pumping systems. They also failed to address one of the biggest initial problems: most villages simply did not have enough high quality groundwater to pump in the first place.

Some very popular misconceptions about design. (1) high tech must mean it’s good and (2) creative solutions must be successful. What is wrong about these conceptions, though, is that they are both solution-focused. They don’t focus on the original problem.

Information Source: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2010/07/01/the-playpump-what-went-wrong/

With empathy, we can gain insights that could not be gathered by any other methods short of highly accurate calculated guesses. A team of postgraduate students at Stanford were tasked with developing a new type of incubator for developing countries. Their direct contact with mothers in remote village settings who were unable to reach hospitals, helped them to reframe their challenge to a warming device rather than a new kind of incubator.

The end result was The Embrace Warmer, which has the potential to save thousands of lives.

The Embrace Warmer is capable of going where no incubator could go before, due to its portability and dramatically reduced production costs. The Embrace Warmer is an ultra-portable incubator which can be wrapped around an infant and be used while the infant is held in the mother’s arm. Instead of needing to deposit their babies into far-flung hospitals, mothers in remote villages can use a portable warmer that serves the same need instead.

Had the team only thought of designing incubators, they may have developed a semi-portable lower cost incubator, which would still not have made it into remote villages. However, with the help of empathy—i.e., understanding the problems mothers in remote villages face—the design team designed a human-centered solution that proved to be optimal for mothers in developing countries. The objective of empathic research is uncovering, at times, intangible needs and feelings, that indicate what should ideally change in the product, system, or environment we're focusing on. Empathic research reveals the deeper needs and root causes, which, if addressed correctly, may profoundly change the project we're investigating. Instead of constantly designing new patches to cover or ease the symptoms only momentarily, we have the power to create a paradigm shift and provide a wide range of benefits packaged into a single solution. We can create new markets and move whole communities closer to higher order needs and goals. We can change the world when we operate at the appropriate levels.

Information Source: https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy