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What's Empathy in the first place?
What's Empathy in the first place?
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their current situation. It is mainly used and developed to understand another person’s point of view because it is how we as individuals understand what others are experiencing as if we were feeling it ourselves. Empathy is usually considered to be one of the key elements of Emotional Intelligence within a person.
So if you want to develop this skill, make sure to follow the next steps!
The Assignment
The Assignment
The first stage of the Design Thinking process is to gain an empathic understanding of the problem you are trying to solve. This involves consulting experts to find out more about the area of concern through observing, engaging and empathizing with people to understand their experiences and motivations, as well as immersing yourself in the physical environment so you can gain a deeper personal understanding of the issues involved. Empathy is crucial to a human-centered design process such as Design Thinking, and empathy allows design thinkers to set aside their own assumptions about the world in order to gain insight into users and their needs.
Depending on time constraints, a substantial amount of information is gathered at this stage to use during the next stage and to develop the best possible understanding of the users, their needs, and the problems that underlie the development of that particular product.
The Empathy Process
The Empathy Process
- Talk
The first phase started off with going out and talking, physically and figuratively. Physically because we decided to interview people around us, and figuratively because we saw the assignment as a "going out of the box" exercise, where we had to put ourselves in the game, not as players but as listeners. We did not set a target group in the beginning as we wanted to try out many different people and find a different needs that can be answered. We talked to our friends, families and even random strangers to find out something about them which they might need a help with.
- Empathise
At the beginning none in the group knew what "empathise" meant. After the class all we knew what to do was keep talking and interacting with people. It seemed like a strange assignment, for once we had to be the listeners instead of the interviewers. The main goal of the exercise was to hear what people have to say to then further understand their issues, and that is what we did. After the first round of the empathising, we had a group meeting in which we shared our experiences and findings. Also we gave each other tips on what works better and what doesn't. With this knowledge, we then went to the second round of interacting with people wich provided us with improved results.
- Taking notes
While listening to the open conversations derived from the empathy side, we decided to take notes to not forget the main issues and claims regarding the people around us. All notes were taken individually and anonymously by each group member, to furthermore be analysed in the last step of this empathy phase.
- Analyse
The last step, as mentioned before, consisted in reading and analysing the outcome of the open conversations together with the other group members during online meetings. Each group member talked to at least 4 people with some group members being able to interact with even more people. The results of this phase will be further explained and researched in the next "Define phase".
What came out?
What came out?
Impact Evidently, worldwide events and tragedies such as those we've been experiencing have a wide range of influences and impacts on people's lives. As we elaborate on the notions provided by people addressed, these experiences differ and fluctuate. However, we trace it back to three different levels, impacts on social life, impacts on careers and work environments, and impacts on the personal level.
Positive Emotions As told by many, finding the positive aspects of this crisis was not easy, however necessary to accept and overcome. Positive emotions expressed to us range from getting closer to loved ones in times of hardship and forming stronger bonds, all the way to acquiring a deeper understanding of healthier lifestyles and ways of getting a stronger, more resilient immunity system.
Negative Emotions Another more prevailing aspect amongst the stages is the negative emotions people are experiencing. These unsurprisingly come in abundance and as conveyed, were not hard to formulate. The negative emotions mentioned were plenty, and also differed based on the person addressed. However, the main concerns experienced are regarding the rising death tolls, as well as the finical instability generated by cribbled economies around the world, as well as the long term implications and uncertainty of the pandemic.
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