Hasta La Ideas

Core-fave Ralph Caplan has a sweet essay on the role (and limits) of empathy in design up on the AIGA Voice site. Here’s a taste:

Empathy in design focuses on the user as a person, not just a consumer. And because it can be very difficult to imagine someone else’s needs, we try getting the necessary information directly. This endeavor is supported by the wisdom of the ages, or at least by a Native American legend admonishing us not to judge anyone without first walking a mile in his moccasins. But, with moccasins as with so much else, one size doesn’t fit all. Once I was researching an article about prisons in Connecticut. The state was at the time experimenting with a program that encouraged lawyers and judges to spend a voluntary weekend in the jug in order to better understand the sentences for which they were responsible. It was a well-meaning experiment, but I doubt that being locked up taught the prosecutors and judges much about incarceration that they didn’t already know. Their experience would have been nothing like that of the real inmates, who did not wish to be there and did not know when they would get out. Empathy would have to supply what a weekend behind bars would not.

Read the whole thing here.

Thanks Steve!

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