Understanding Empathy: Its Significance in the Design Thinking

This essay defines empathy as the ability to feel and understand others' emotions, highlighting its importance in design thinking. It outlines essential steps for empathetic design, including discovery, immersion, connection, and detachment, emphasizing the need to understand users' perspectives and needs. The essay discusses the combination of emotional and intellectual empathy in design and how it enables designers to understand physical and emotional needs, referencing the parameters of desirability, viability, and feasibility for successful products and services. The document is available on Desklib, a platform offering study tools and resources for students.

“What is Empathy and why is it so important for Design Thinking?”
Empathy is used to elaborate huge number
of experiences. Researchers of emotions
have generally defined the empathy as an
ability of feel the emotions of other people.
In more simpler words, it means
comprehending people`s emotions by
perceiving someone else feeling and
thinking.
Empathy
By combining the combination of
both the types of empathy such as
emotional empathy and
intellectual empathy, it signifies
that one uses his potential to
respond with right emotions.
Whereas intellectual empathy
enables to hear it thoughtfully and
imagine to share other`s
convictions
References:
Villadangos, M., Errasti, J., Amigo, I., Jolliffe, D., &
García-Cueto, E. (2016). Characteristics of Empathy in young
people measured by the Spanish validation of the Basic Empathy
Scale. Psicothema, 28(3), 323-329.
Holt, S., Marques, J., Hu, J., & Wood, A. (2017). Cultivating empathy: New
perspectives on educating business leaders. The Journal of Values-Based
Leadership, 10(1), 3.
Ahmad, A., & Khan, M. N. (2017). Developing a website service quality
scale: a confirmatory factor analytic approach. Journal of internet
Commerce, 16(1), 104-126.
Dam, R. and Siang, T., (2019). Design Thinking: Getting Started with
Empathy. Retrieved from: https
://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-
started-with-empathy
• Empathy is important for the
business success –
• Many leaders have penetrated the
market with the help of leaning,
innovation and entrepreneurship
where design thinking is such a point
that has to be repeated again and
again. There are basically three main
parameters which define successful
product and service- desirability,
viability and feasibility.
Empathy and
design thinking
Essential steps for designing empathetically
• Discovery- it is the first step of the framework
in order to promote empathy in the design
thinking. This part of process where a person
enters in the user`s world and make
connections.
• Immersion- it is the second step of this
empathy framework. Rather than simply
introducing the self to the users, it is important
to get involve in them and directly experience
activities and contexts. The main objective of
immersion stage is to discover intangible
feelings and needs which indicate what ideally
has changed the focus of the product.
• Connection- to treat the emerging empathy with
the users requires more listening and imitate
their lives. In order to interpret the world with
the eyes of certain filters such as religion,
culture, values and history, which can further
help them to design for their business to serve
customers. It is mandatory to conduct a
research and collect data accordingly.
• Detachment- it is the final step in the
framework where role of the designer set back
to reflect what actually he has experienced and
further generate ideas. This step is the key to
design thinking process.
Empathy is the initial step
of design thinking
Empathy enables the
designers to eventually
understand people`s
thinking such as physical
and emotional needs which
are necessary to design a
product or service