Design Toolkit: Empathy
This post was written by Daniel Douglas. Daniel is a project and intern coordinator at the Alhambra U.S. Chamber.
On July 6th, the Alhambra U.S. Chamber hosted an event that focused on using empathy as a tool in design thinking, what empathy can provide, and the impact it can have. The event was hosted by Calvin Mays, who is the Founder and Principal Designer at Qubicle Design and a design thinking coach at the Stanford Design School, and Bill Pacheco, the Founder of Open Until 8 and a fellow design thinking coach at the Stanford Design School. The speakers are also Lecturers at the University of Texas and Boston College, respectively. This interactive session was designed to introduce participants to the design process and how empathy can create a lasting impact on students.
Even though the session started out early in the day at 6:00 AM CST, all participants were eager to discuss how empathy could be used as a tool in design thinking, and how empathy and design thinking, a skill usually associated with product design and innovation, could be applied to assist students both online and in the classroom. Bill began the session by discussing the critical skills required for students in the 21st century and a story to highlight those skills.
Bill discussed how he applied empathy while investigating customer needs in-depth when asked to design an innovative treadmill for Cybex International. His team began by going to different gyms and observing how people used the existing treadmills. They realized that many held onto exercise machine. They also noticed how many items people brought in from their homes, even though the machines had little storage for those items. Using these insights, they created a radically different type of treadmill. When they put a prototype in the field and interviewed gym-goers, they found out that safety was just as important to the treadmill users as exercise. After a while, the team used all this information to create a new treadmill design, which became the Cybex 770T. No other treadmill designed by a competitor had the extra handles and item holding areas, after the Cybex 770T was released, Cybex International had a 20% growth rate for two years in a row. The success of the Cybex 770T was due to the empathy Bill and his team showed for the gym-goers.
Bill and Calvin then categorized the skills they applied to design the Cybex 770T. Empathy was the primary tool within their “design toolkit”, and secondary tools included:
Rapid prototyping of ideas
Embracing and navigating conflicting views
Trusting the empathy research when the going got tough
and Repeated testing of prototypes
Bill summarized these 21st century skills the ability to create, collaborate, and inspire. Calvin then discussed how these design thinking tools can be used to cultivate a 21st century learning environment. His five tools to cultivate and promote learning discussed were:
Making learning relevant to everyday issues
Increasing the student voice
Displaying student work publicly to give students pride in their work
Making the process more interesting and engaging
and Fostering a desire to succeed within every student.
After focusing on ways to notice and empathize with the problems customers and students may have, Calvin led an exercise designed to help brainstorm solutions to everyday problems. He showed how running design scenarios to understand what potential complications and successes may arise from a specific project design is an important part of the design process. Calvin instructed the guests to take out a piece of paper and a pencil and design a waste removal system for a person with a disability. The participants were only given five minutes, and several people asked for more information about the disabled person. Calvin smiled and told the participants that they weren't going to receive any further information, and that was part of the exercise: everyone had their own interpretation of disability and that there were many factors to consider. In the end, all the participants had very different designs, but Calvin showed how all the different designs could contribute to creating a trash system that would serve people with many different disabilities. Open collaborative environments allow for the integration of sometimes outlandish ideas to solve problems that different people encounter and feel, bringing together all the strengths of design thinking.
To wrap up the session, the participants were asked to consider how to apply the principles of empathy in everyday life, for their customers, community members, and students. After hearing a wide range of answers, Calvin urged the participants to use design thinking tools of brainstorming, testing, and empathy to improve the world they knew. He left the participants with one final question: “How might we...” For a moment the group paused because he had left us hanging, but that was the point. By asking “How might we”, he left us all wondering what could be done with the tools we had explored together.
Qubicle Design is a full-service human-centered design agency focused on service design and design education. We take a co-creative approach to developing internal and external systems, applying proven repeatable design methodologies, putting people first.
The goal of the Alhambra-U.S. Chamber is to engage, excite, and empower younger generations by expanding their knowledge base and problem-solving abilities while instilling confidence and self-worth through the design thinking approach. If you are interested in learning more about Alhambra-U.S. Chamber involvement in youth empowerment and design thinking, be sure to follow us on social media:
Instagram: @alhambra_us
Facebook: @alhambrauschamber
Twitter: @alhambraUSC
LinkedIn: Alhambra US Chamber
