Nadiye Meral Çakir

I have spent one and a half year of my maters specializing in Empathy in Social Design. Now, I am convinced that the empathic designer should be considered the new normal designer, as complex problems are surpassing familiar contexts and the effect of a designer’s decisions is becoming bigger because of it. In my previous blog posts, I have talked about discovering and researching empathy in cross-cultural contexts and if used, how it would increase impact in the minor programme International Entreperneurship & Development. I also argue what practices should be incorporated to evoke empathy in the programme and why this would boost the motivation of the students after the fact.

This will be my reflection on my own empathic practices, and how ironically, I believe I still kind of suck at it.

During the regular curriculum I made sure all the projects I was working on had some sort of social context for me to practice empathy skills. I found it hard during COVID-19 as most of the time I was at home stuck to a screen. User research was therefore done online and there was limited access to context. A lot of interpretation and assumptions were forcefully made because there was no other option. Rounding up projects always made me wonder how realistic my claims would be. Do my users really want this? Or am I still projecting myself onto my end-users? I found myself concluding that doing empathy in design correctly requires you to be and interact with your users and their context.

I then had the opportunity to do an internship for 510 – an Initiative from the Netherlands Red Cross. I was asked to help with user tests and write manuals for their digital products. The users were from all over the world, which allowed me to collaborate with people from countries like Uganda and the Philippines. Orla Canavan, my mentor, and designer herself, taught me to really listen to your users and showed me how that’s still possible online. She showed me how in the real world, the true value of an empathic designer is being the translator of your end-user to the rest of your team. This meant leaving your biases and interpretations at the door and just pass on information provided to you. Believe me, this is easier said than done. Having had ample training in user centered design with an industrial design engineering bachelor and half-way through my strategic product design master, I found myself multiple times weaving interpretations into transcriptions. Showing me that empathy in design is something which lies in the details but have major effect in the bigger picture. This was quite te realization for my own reflection on being an empathic designer.

Finally, my graduation thesis: I was looking for social design assignments here too. Initially I wanted to do a similar project to my Kenyan experience, but due to COVID-19 I opted to collaborate with the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. I thought this project would not directly be associated with what I have been working on, but little did I know.

I was asked to design for (future) social issues that are relevant for the Ministry to strategize for. As the world is moving more into a digital world, I observed many issues arising in this context. There is a loss of empathy towards each other when there is only a profile picture and username attached to someone. This causes people to interact to others in very different ways than in the real world. Which I thought was a suitable context to design for. The Ministry refers to this as harmful and immoral online behaviour.

When embarking on this research, I started exploring the context and the activities previously done within the Ministry. Olof Schuring, my mentor, has provided many different colleagues and perspectives to interact with, which offered me real insights from real people. I soon discovered there already has been quite some activity surrounding the topic done by several parties within the Ministry. But here comes the biggest pitfall I have experienced yet: as a strategic designer, operating in our safe university bubble, we can find ourselves to have a sort of arrogance over us. We come into organizations wondering ‘why they don’t just do it differently?’ We assume our research is ample enough to draw near-sighted conclusions and praise design practices as if it is the solution to all. I must admit, I found myself thinking the same. Which is far from being anything like an empathic designer. Instead, I should have asked myself why they do what they do and how it contributes positively to the process. Civil servants and governments operate very different from designers, but that does not always make their practices wrong or ill-willed.

Before Christmas 2021, Olof and I had a meeting with a colleague and Strategic Product Design alumni Nina Timmers. I shared in this meeting that I struggled at this stage with communicating my research insights, because they were on processes people personally worked on. This is a key component of my graduation and essential to be done right.

Her perspective on empathy in design had a different approach, but nonetheless was a striking addition to my knowledge and the journey of my graduation. Being experienced in social design throughout her career she advised me to think critically about language, using examples and making things smaller and tangible. For example: telling people they don’t put something they have been working on for years as their center of their attention, can simply be wrong. Even though your perception, expertise or insights might indicate so. Empathy also means you don’t know everything or the full picture, therefore you should act on only what you know.

This shows that practicing empathy in communication and storytelling is essential to get everyone on board with the changes you’re trying to propose for them. Exemplifying once again that there are many different aspects to practicing empathy in design and I am nowhere perfect at it. But open to learn!

Looking back on this journey, I feel empowered with the knowledge I have now. I realize that what I learned in Kenya and my research followed on top of that allowed me as a designer to grow exponentially. Just as mentioned before, I believe making mistakes and learning from them are key to grow as an empathic designer. Which I am doing every day still – and will be doing the rest of my life.

There is a vivid memory I have in Kenya, nearing the end of the project. Because we were asked to design a product, we followed the double diamond design process taught to us by Industrial Design Engineering. However, I still had an underbelly feeling that what we made was not truly desirable for our end-user. When watching people test the cargo bicycle, it almost looked like they found it kind of silly. They saw they could transport more goods, but we never actually asked them if they wanted to transport more. We just assumed more is better because that’s what we value. Besides that, we were too far in already and it would be a waste to let the project collapse at this stage.

Years later, reflecting on this insight it was clear this could have been avoided if there was more knowledge surrounding truly understanding your end-user, their values and the context their living in. Being from the Netherlands and having Western cultural values, will project many biases on to your end-user which is not from this background at all. It will result in solutions that do not actually suit them.

I now also realize that empathy in design takes a lot of practice and I am nowhere near perfect at it (more to follow in the next blogpost). However, I believe that motivation of students can be influenced when reflection is stimulated around their current empathic capabilities.

In December 2020 I reached out to the current staff of International Entrepreneurship & Development to share and discuss the insights. It was a good moment to meet, as they were already working on changing the programme. Much of the suggested insights were on their radar, but the student’s perspective from the interviews was new.

Next to that, design thinking and empathy in design are not standard for the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management. Students would indicate that they often needed design thinking skills during their time doing the project abroad. But the fact of the matter is that it is not assumed those skills will always be present in every multi-discplinary team in the minor programme. Furthermore, empathy in design does not come naturally either. When young designers step out of their own context, they often struggle understanding the end-user. As mentioned before, it takes a lot of practice and reflection on yourself to comprehend someone from a completely different context than you.

We agreed on starting a collaboration, so that I could contribute my input and design skills into their new programme. My main objective of this process was to infuse more reflection moments. When analysing the input of the interviews, motivation seems to be tied in with expectation management, truly understanding the problem and understanding your end-user better. For example: if you go into a project expecting to economically improve the living standard of all the farmers in Kenya by giving them a cargo bicycle, it is likely you will be disappointed and demotivated.

The way to avoid this is to stimulate reflection interventions asking critical questions in the following stages: 

During the preparation phase of the project, which takes place in Delft, it would be good to reflect on your own self as a person and the privileges you have. A sort of baseline for the students. An example on how to reflect on this would be to do Maya Goodwill’s ‘Power Literacy’ workshop. This is a graduation thesis from the Master Design for Interaction, where designers are invited to critically reflect on their privilege, power and the effect they would have in a project¹.

While students are working on the problem definition phase, taking place in Delft as well as on location, they should ask their selves if the problem as perceived is the actual problem. Or as Froukje Sleeswijk Visser would say: “find the problem behind the problem”. Because students are operating in a cross-cultural context, they cannot just assume the problem is justified because they find it a problem. Reflective activities should revolve around asking students if they talked to the people having this problem and if they have asked their selves which assumptions they are projecting on the problem.

When the research and design phase start, students are forced to research in an unfamiliar context and its culture. There are cultural sensitivity tools available, for example Hofstede’s model or Hao & Boeijen’s Cultura. These tools offer guidance to bridge cultural differences but it can also stimulate reflection while executing this phase, especially when students are aware of their privileges.

In the interview insights, the validation stage was often the moment students were prompt to reflect on the project. As mentioned in the introduction, this is where I realised we made major assumptions during the previous steps. Facilitating ‘safe space’ reflections for students at this stage is essential. It is by no means necessary for them to do perfect on all these previous activities. It would be better to undergo pitfalls, to be able to reflect on them. Acknowledging missteps should be praised as a learning experience, to stimulate students to try again in another project. Because being perfect is boring anyway, and you can learn so much more from things that do not go so well.

Throughout this process I also invited fellow students and teachers to think along on how to provide a didactic tool to facilitate these reflection practices. We concluded that empathy in cross-cultural context is a fuzzy topic that requires many different aspects of soft skills as well as growth in the programme. It was not as easy as I initially thought to provide a tool for students to use. However, first steps were made to incorporate reflection interventions during the student’s time abroad. This includes aspects of reflective activities that was suggested – change is in progress!

1: https://www.power-literacy.com/about