Patrick Quattlebaum is Managing Director of
Adaptive Path, an experience
strategy and design company. Patrick is also an
in demand consultant who helps organizations envision, architect, and
manifest new product and service experiences. He’s a passionate strategist, designer, humanist, storyteller, facilitator, and teacher.
In this dialog we discussed his article
and explored ways to increase and practice our personal empathy skills.
Patrick writes, "We, the design community, talk (and
write and speak) a lot about empathy. We lament the empathy deficit in
our companies and clients and cry "something must be done about
this." We tout personas, empathy maps, experience maps, and other
methods as empathy deficit reducers that lead to better experiences (and
profits). Some, at the extremes, position human-centered designers
as Platonic figures releasing stakeholders from the shadows of opinion
and faceless analytics into the reality of human emotions, needs, and
desires. We talk a lot about other people's empathy. But what about your own?
What about mine? "
(Video
Transcriptions: If you would like to take empathic action
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Service
Design Soft Skill Builder: Empathy "We, the design community, talk (and
write and speak) a lot about empathy. We lament the empathy deficit in
our companies and clients and cry "something must be done about
this." We tout personas, empathy maps, experience maps, and other
methods as empathy deficit reducers that lead to better experiences (and
profits). Some, at the extremes, position human-centered designers
as Platonic figures releasing stakeholders from the shadows of opinion
and faceless analytics into the reality of human emotions, needs, and
desires. We talk a lot about other people's empathy. But what about your own?
What about mine? "
EPIC 2012: Action-packed Tangible Empathy Workshop
"In this workshop,”Tangible Empathy: Research for the Design of
Touchpoints”, the attendees experienced an intensive and condensed
“learn by doing” approach to capturing and translating design research
in a mere three and a half hours! Being given the broad research
questions of “How do users interact with touchpoints within the current
experience?” and “How does the environmental context impact these
interactions?” four teams, using four separate research activities
(photo safari, scene tracing, flow diagrams, and touchpoint cards), set
out into the heart of Savannah to study how members of the community
behaved and interacted with their ‘stuff’ in the context of space (more
specifically local coffee shops). "
