Empathy Why Is It More Important in the Current Environment?

Being a student of design thinking, I have been taught the importance of empathising. This is a crucial characteristic for a designer to create experiences that people love and identify themselves with. Is this important only for designers and product creators ?

I think this is a critical skill that we all should learn and demonstrate more frequently to understand each other better. Wikipedia has a very interesting definition for Empathy: is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within the other beings frame of reference, i.e.

, the capacity to place oneself in anothers positionThe most crucial point to note is the importance of seeing/experiencing from others frame of reference.We are amid an extraordinary era. Things are changing all over.

Openness and diversity are being shunned and world is getting closed and rigid. This is the same narrative in most of the countries. Being diverse and more open can make a society more prosperous like it did post World War-2.

Why, despite all the evidence that being closed is not a viable solution, World is moving towards protectionism?General reaction to this has been blaming a section of population who seem to embrace this thought process and terming them as bigots. Is that even correct?

Shankar Vedantam in his excellent NPR Podast episode The Deep Story examines this phenomenon deeper. When i was listening to this podcast i was able to connect the dots on what is going around us and why it is soIn the podcast, Shankar Vedantam tries to answer the paradox of why voters elect a party that are exactly opposite to their own self-interest and ideology. A very interesting question and I think this is applicable to all countries and not just USA.

Quoting Shankar: We all have stories, stories about our traditions, stories about our setbacks, stories about our dreams. These stories shape our identity. They help us define whos on our side and whos not.

My guest today explores how such stories shaped the way we think about politics. How true! We all have narratives that defines us.

When the narratives are challenged, we are confused on as how to react and respondEven the people who want to change the narrative need to understand this and have empathy to bring about the change they want.Shankars guest for that podcast was Arlie Hochschild a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of the book Strangers In Their Own Land: Anger And Mourning On The American Right. So, what does Arlie do differently for this book?

Rather than theorizing on why people think and act the way they do; she spends lot of time with people who have opposite views from her.When people see things that are exactly opposite to the ideology that they are brought up with and that ideology is encouraged and their own existence gets challenged. She, says then people start feeling like strangers in their own country, the majority starts feeling like minority.

Now what matters, is not economic reality but peoples own deep story about reality and the information that supports that deep story. Once this cycle is created, then it becomes difficult for anyone to break that cycle.So not just in designing new products and services, even in the area of political standing, empathy is very important.

It is essential to understand perspectives of people before boxing them to a category and even ridiculing them.With empathy, we can understand each others differences better from their frame of reference and then accept the differences and help each other to live peacefully.What happens when we try to correct people from their deep story ?

Let us see it in the next articleTo listen to the podcast episode please go to: npr. org/2017/01/24/510567860/strangers-in-their-own-land-the-deep-story-of-trump-supporters RELATED QUESTION Furniture: What's the best chair for designers? There is nothing standardised about a particular chair being best for designers.

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The chair must complement the sitting style with adjustable backs resting firmly against the spine. This is important strong back support. Many prefer a flexible back where they can lean back to a certain degree but that is not advisable if you are putting in long hours.

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