Learning About Empathy

In class, we became engaged in learning about an aspect of the human condition which we can use to help in our design process. This is having empathy, an “understanding for an other or the user”, as McCarthy and Wright put it. This paper emphasizes the importance of feeling like another person, which is a contrast to what previous waves of HCI have dealt with (cognitive representations of users and their mental models)

The writers of this paper (McCarthy and Wright), give twi theories as to how to gain empathy. One is identification reenactment, which allows one to get access to the emotional state (this draws on the notion of recognizing and perceiving the emotion of another person). The other is the “intersubjective accomplishment and fusion of horizons”, meaning that empathy is a “shared thing”, where the designer and the user can integrate their reactions together continually to gain a perspective of the other.

In order to get to this state, we turn to the philosopher Bakhtin, who tells us about “aesthetic seeing”, which is a “valuational response” to what we are seeing and feeling from our senses. This, of course, is subjective, which is a polar opposite to traditional scientific research (which must have a testable, strict hypothesis, repeatable results, have an algorithmic process, and allowing for the “brute data” gained from the experiment to speak for the scientist). This then led to the question: can social sciences be modelled after physical sciences? This question has been looked at for a long time, but we are referred to 2 papers for further discussion: Kline’s Two Dogmas of Empiricism and Taylor’s Interpretation in the Sciences of Man.

Getting back to Bakhtin, we can also use his theories on dialogism as a means to structure our relationships as designers to others and to users. There is meant to be a dialogue, where both designer and user can attune to each other (like radios) in order to come together and meet as peers, rather than having a “power relationship”. The attuning may help both sides not have linguistic clashes with each other (smells like ethnography here) This power may end up having designers either just look at people and get data from them and then never be seen again. This is a major faux pas. This dialogism will also help to protect those who are being studied from being exploited commercially as well. In addition, when used correctly, it’ll also help to create an open-ended discussion between designer and user (or study-ee), rather than degenerating to the power a designer may have over people or an “assumed” relationship the two should be having.

This aesthetic seeing is completely affective and emotional, and has very little to do with the cognitive aspects that HCI has been doing in its history. Historically, the use of cognitive and mental model approaches have led designers to formalize and abstract the people whom we are designing for. These measures were taken in the form of quantifiable data (productivity, behavior, etc.). When one discards the importance of dealing with felt life and emotions, a big picture about the people whom we are designing for is lost, potentially leading to a sub-par experience for these people. This is selling them short.

Lastly, for the fans of word games, here’s an analogy for you to play around with that sums up this whole post empiricism: behavior :: aesthetic seeing (dialogic, empathic, creative, empathic, hermeneutic, value-positioned, subjective): experience.