The Uncomfortable Process of Empathy and Self-Awareness
Self-reflexivity as an important tool for designers
You have to put yourself in someone else’s shoes if you want to be a good designer.
This is something you’ve probably heard many, many times.
“Empathy is the centerpiece of a human-centered design process. The Empathize mode is the work you do to understand people, within the context of your design challenge. It is your effort to understand the way they do things and why, their physical and emotional needs, how they think about world, and what is meaningful to them.” -Institute of Design at Stanford
However, this step might be more complicated than just learning from and engaging with the key stakeholders.
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Self-Reflexivity
When we show up to work, we bring our full selves — our experiences, our identities, our biases. And so, even with good intentions, when we begin the design thinking process, there is a possibility of not *truly* meeting the needs of our users. To engage in human-centered design thinking, we must focus on the people — the culture within which they operate, the behaviors they habitually practice, their intersectionalities, etc.
Photo by Matt LaVasseur on Unsplash
To do so, we must think about how our own personal experiences influence our interpretations of the stories we hear and the people we come across, especially as a designer.
What Designers Can Learn From Best Practices of Comparative Rhetoric
To borrow from a comparative rhetor, Mary Garret, we must examine the “culturally mediated and historically situated self” to be self-reflexive.
In this piece, Garrett talks about how her identity as a woman led her to believe she could speak for women in her work on traditional Chinese rhetoric instead of “recollecting and reflecting, of questioning one’s reactions and suppositions.”
In addition to “asking the natives” and “putting yourself in another person’s position,” she argues that self-awareness is also a key step in reflexivity.
By neglecting this step, we put our blinders on, and in turn, we leave ourselves exposed to unnoticed bias.
If we don’t know what we don’t know, we willingly produce bad design, while still carrying a sense of confidence.
We do this because self-awareness is hard, it’s uncomfortable — we might even have to suspend our own values and ethics, our entire worldview, to understand where someone is coming from.
“Self-reflexivity often means frustration, emotional discomfort, and the shock of a disturbingly more accurate image of one’s self.” -Garrett
Shedding Our Own Habitus: It’s Uncomfortable and Might Require Emotional Distance
Garrett actually opens up her article with a story I found quite unpleasant and shocking at first:
Sometime around 311 CE the official Deng You fled the Xiongnu invasions with his wife, their only son, and Deng You’s nephew, who was the orphaned only son of his brother. Along the way they abandoned their carriage and lost their ox and horse.
Teng Yu [Deng You] said to his wife, ‘‘My younger brother died early and there is only his son, Sui, left to carry on his name. Now that we have to travel on foot, to carry both boys on our back and have all of us die would not be as good as abandoning our own son and carrying Sui in our arms. Afterwards we may still have another son.’’ His wife consented. Yu [You] abandoned his own son in the grass. The boy followed, sobbing and calling after them, finally catching up with them at nightfall. The next morning Yu bound his son to a tree and departed, and so they got across the Yangtze River.1 (Liu 15–16)
Later on in the article, she talks about her difficulty with empathizing or even understanding this decision. However, she later realizes, through self-awareness, that her own idea of ethics and understanding of the world have impacted this assumption and analysis.
For me, I was still digging my heels in, thinking to myself. I am right, it doesn’t matter if they have different ideas of ethics, those ideas are wrong. It took reading this passage to actually (but still, I must admit, not fully) begin to shift my thinking.
“Shifting to distance-near terms, it is clear from other stories in this genre that Deng You’s choice would be characterized as gong, a word meaning ‘‘unselfish, public-spirited, public,’’ whose contrary is si, meaning ‘‘selfish, private, putting one’s own interests ahead of others.’’ Once Deng You’s decision is cast in distance near terms, it becomes not only the superior ethical choice, but the only ethical choice.” -Garrett
Good Intentions Do Not Always Lead to Results
In fact, your mind will probably try to rationalize due to the cognitive dissonance and other biases at play. It is not easy — it’s not a quick fix, but that doesn’t mean that examining the levels of influence isn’t instrumental to the design thinking process.
‘‘Greater self-reflexivity may not suffice to reveal to ourselves our own biases and blind spots and raises the prospect that reflexivity might actually be a form of rationalization for unconscious motivations and prejudices’’ (Haggerty 153–162).
Human-Centered Design Thinking
The advice, “leave your biases at the door” can’t actually happen without putting in the hard work. Point being, if we want our designs to be effective, we have to align them with the situation, not with our own preconceptions.
Bringing our full selves — our identities and world-views — to the conversation is still important, valuable even. Self-awareness is simply the ability to understand where we might be blinding ourselves. And when entering into the empathizing step of design thinking, shedding that sense of self, even for a moment, to really understand the other person. By doing so, you can truly understand the pain points of the user; contextualize the problem and be able to get to the root of it; and iterate on your design in a productive, user-focused way.
