Cultivating empathic design in an analytical world
There is an empathy gap in technology development, argues April Demosky on the FT’s Tech Blog.
“In the analytic, data-driven world of Silicon Valley, emotions often do not get factored into the latest product design.
This comes down to the way engineers and technicians think, says Anthony Jack, the director of the mind, brain, and consciousness lab at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. […]
That tension appears in the hallways of Google and Facebook, where technical thinkers reign. Understanding how people in Africa use a product, or how people who speak Dutch use it, often starts with looking at data. […]
At the Wisdom 2.0 Conference in San Francisco, Mr Jack urged technology leaders to do more to incorporate empathic-minded people into the production process, so that their tools were more relevant and useful to everyday folk.
“It’s still hard for a Google employee to really understand what it’s like for an average user to use a Google product,†Mr Jack said.”
Related article: Cerebral circuitry on on whether gadgets are changing how our brains work as regards empathy and human interaction:
“Online culture, and social networks in particular, are oriented toward outer lives, rather than inner lives, [says Jaron Lanier, a prominent Silicon Valley technologist]. It favours objective, quantitative thoughts over subjective, qualitative feelings.
Today’s dominant internet programs reflect the analytic minds of the engineers who built them and fail to capture the humanistic elements of everyday life, he says. As a result, technology is reducing the range of cognitive styles, similar to monocropping in agriculture, where the cultivation of one massive crop of wheat on the same land year after year reduces the diversity of soil nutrients and results in less resilient plants.”
