The next time you’re at your local bookstore, leaf through “Wired to Care,” a new book by Jump Associates’ Dev Patnaik.  The book is a collection of stories – against-the-odds stories of products, strategies, and projects that achieved success because their developers understood their user.  This understanding, Patnaik explains, is achieved through practicing empathy.  A rough translation of “practicing empathy”:  If you’re not elderly and you’re designing a product for an elderly person, you might try mimicking the life and experiences of an elderly person to better inform your design.  A slow walking pace, comments from impatient younger people, physical weakness, impaired vision – the first passage in the book is a wonderful story of this transformation for a designer.

(If more designers took this approach, maybe the artifacts of old age – orthopedic shoes, walkers, bi-focals, wheelchairs – might come with less of a stigma.)

user interviews in India, addressing clean water issues

On a personal level, Patnaik’s message resonates with Catapult’s mission and addresses a common question we receive from designers:  How do you design for people’s who’s culture is so different from your own?

To start, we never claim to know the needs of people we’re designing for.  As consultants, we work for clients – other nonprofits, social enterprises, etc – who are the initiators of projects.  In that sense, they’ve identified a need within their community – our job is to help them actualize a solution to that need.

It’s a fact that poor people around the world need access to clean water, better sanitation, access to medicine – each of these problems has a variety of existing solutions.  In some cases, our job is to evaluate and select existing solutions, not necessarily innovate new ones.  To inform that decision we lean on our clients, or partners, to facilitate our understanding of community values.  It’s through them that we gain access to end-users, credibility, and insight that guides our decision-making.

It’s true that our designers will never fully know a life in poverty, but the fact that we’re very conscious of that is what makes us better designers.

Our particular sector has enough sympathetic designers, but not enough empathetic designers.  The difference is the result: well-meaning, but failed technology rooted in hubris.  The golden rule of product design: thou shalt never design for yourself.  A good designer has the ability and foresight to reach outside his/her own world and connect with people – whether they’re in the developed world or the developing world.