What Happened to Empathic Design?
| Autor: | Ilpo Koskinen, Kirsikka Vaajakallio, Tuuli Mattelmäki |
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| Rok vydání: | 2014 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Design Issues. 30:67-77 |
| ISSN: | 1531-4790 0747-9360 |
| Popis: | Introduction At the end of the 1990s, designers began to encounter new types of challenges. Designers, design researchers, and industry wanted to explore feelings and moods and their links to design solutions. This brought along an interest for new approaches to design— approaches that were able to dive into more ambiguous topics, such as experiences, meaningful everyday practices, and emotions, and to connect them to innovative solutions. There were no established constructions to build upon, and concepts from ergonomics and user-centered design were too inflexible. This state of affairs created the need to find new ways to, on the one hand, make sense of people and, on the other, to create openings for design. As an answer to this call, Leonard and Rayport suggested “spark[ing] innovation through empathic design.” They proposed that empathic design would especially entail “techniques (that) require unusual collaborative skills,” “open-mindedness, observational skills, and curiosity,” and the use of visual information as well as an understanding of companies’ existing capabilities combined with “the eyes of a fresh observer” in the users’ own contexts. The suggested mindset of combining subjective and objective approaches and design competence in field studies was thus adopted and elaborated by many practitioners and researchers.1 This paper tells the story of how a group of design researchers in Helsinki have constructed an interpretive approach to empathic design. Empathic design has its roots in design practice. It is interpretive but, in contrast to ethnographic research, focuses on everyday life experiences, and on individual desires, moods, and emotions in human activities, turning such experiences and emotions into inspiration. This paper shows how empathic ideas can turn into a long-lasting research program—one that develops around a few key ideas, is able to respond to many kinds of new challenges, and maintains the core key ideas around which the new applications of the program are built. To describe this development, we illustrate how research has produced contribution in three key areas: research practices, methods, and topics. The program’s evolution shows how the roles and relationships of both designers and 1 Dorothy Leonard and Jeffrey F. Rayport, “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design,” Harvard Business Review 75, no. 6 (Nov-Dec, 1997): 10–13. 2 From Henry Dreyfuss’s Design for People to Tomas Maldonado’s definition of industrial design for ICSID International Council of Societies of Industrial Design in the mid-1950s and Stanford’s adoption of the term, human-centered design slightly later. 3 Leonard and Rayport, “Spark Innovation Through Empathic Design,” Patrick Jordan, Designing Pleasurable Products (London: Taylor and Francis, 2000); Elizabeth B. N. Sanders and Ulau Dandavate, “Design for Experience: New Tools,” Proceedings of the First International Conference on Design and Emotion (Delft, The Netherlands: TU Delft, 1999): 87–92; Jane Fulton, “Physiology and Design: Ideas About Physiological Human Factors and the Consequences for Design Practice,” American Center for Design Journal 7 (1993): 7-15; Alison Black, “Empathic Design: User Focused Strategies for Innovation,” Proceedings of New Product Development (IBC Conferences; Darrel K. Rhea, “A New Perspective on Design: Focusing on Customer Experience,” Design Management Journal (Fall, 1992): 40–48; B. Joseph Pine, II and James H. Gilmore, The Experience Economy (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1999); Jodi Forlizzi and Shannon Ford, “The Building Blocks of Experience: An Early Framework for Interaction Designers,” Proceedings of DIS2000 (New York: ACM Press, 2000): 419-23. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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