The one kind of ‘empathy’ we didn’t learn about in design school.
Those who read design-related writing would have encountered the word ‘empathy’ far too often. It’s thrown around an awful lot in conversations about staying human-centric in the context of branding, design thinking, strategy, and product development. The human being referred to is usually the user, or customer. And it’s very important to being a better designer, or rather being a more effective designer. But you learnt that in design school didn’t you? To solve business problems keeping the customer in clear sight is intrinsic to how many of us think.
But what of those who come to us bearing design projects?
Having practised professionally in an India that’s still learning about the power & quantifiable value of design, I find that there’s one kind of empathy we designers need to show more than ever. After working in design firms both big and small for over 15 years, I find increasingly that we need to empathise not just with the consumer, but also our clients.
At Glyph, we work with all sorts of businesses:
a) Bootstrapped ones who have low design budgets but want the world, fast and cheap.
b) Hands-on entrepreneurs who take their perfectionist reputation far too seriously.
c) Medium enterprises that are set in their old ‘cobble-it-together-as-we-go-along’ ways.
d) Large professionally run enterprises who believe design is dictated and designers have no clue about business.
All of the above-mentioned types are far from our ideal design-embracing, risk-taking client mind-set. Yet these are 90% of the people we work with. So very fundamentally different from us in our thinking, and yet our goals couldn’t be more aligned - to create output that is successful for their business objectives.
But designers aren’t taught business. Nor do they fully understand the very real fear involved in investing a large sum of money, maybe borrowed, or could be someone’s life savings, all in an idea or a mere paper napkin sketch. It could have some strong emotional motives too - a personal challenge perhaps, a chance to prove something, either to someone, a collective, the single chance to bounce back from a bad financial phase, or even to make a statement of an ideological difference.
“Put yourself in their shoes.” I say this a lot to my talented colleagues at work. I’m sometimes referring to consumers, but a lot of the times, I’m referring to our clients.
Over the years, we’ve partnered with people or with brands whom we’ve seen change their attitudes towards us during the course of the project. We attribute this to not just our skills in people-management, but more to the fact that we work closely enough to inform them of our thinking. We walk a mile in their shoes. We learn from their experiences. After all, they’ve lived with their business idea far longer than we have. We learn about their business ambitions. We learn about their history, their lives. We begin to care about their business, their struggles. We begin to fear their fears.
Equally, entrepreneurs, business-owners and business heads don’t always understand that design is deliberate and strategic. That there’s a very definite science to cultivating how brands, and products are received. Their suggestions come with the motive of making improvements. They often dictate direction not to hurt egos, but because they think that’s the best way forward. And we’ve found that when we involve them in our thinking, they value it. We make them relate to their customer. They come to understand our methods.
No business owner or entrepreneur in our experience has ever dismissed sound logic. And that’s why a well documented process that explains how design thinking manifests into creative solutions, becomes all the more important. Walk them through your approach. It’s good for the designer, great for the client, and best for the rest of us in the industry. We must undo the poor precedent that has been set by those who came before us. Let’s help the word ‘design’ transcend just aesthetics. Let’s do a better job of explaining ourselves.