Submit your reading response by making a comment on this post. In your response, please respond to each of the prompts below. Please number your responses so it’s clear which response goes with which prompt.

Battarbe, Suri, & Howard

1) In discussing some of the obstacles to having empathy, the authors say the following:

However, some of the qualities and behaviors that can make a person successful in business can stand in the way of achieving empathy: people who cannot temporarily let go of their role or status or set aside their own expertise or opinion will fail to empathize with others who have conflicting thoughts, experiences, or mental models. (p. 62)

It is interesting to ask if the same thing can be said about the qualities and behaviors that make someone successful in academia.

• Do you think this quote is also applicable to the typical professor at Western? Why or why not? Feel free to draw on your own experience to explain your reasoning.

2) Near the end of the article, the authors discuss some examples of ways they’ve helped companies understand the experience of their customers. A couple notable examples are under the headings “Long-Term Immersion” and “Take Clients on ‘Visceral Journeys’ “. Obviously these kinds of activities represent a significant investment of time and energy by the company involved.

• What obstacles can you envision that might prevent these kinds of practices becoming routine and wide-spread?
• What factors do you think might encourage or promote the use of such practices? (in other words, what could you do to make them more likely)

Koupre and Visser

3) In the first part of their article, the authors essentially say that lots of people are talking about empathy, but that designers have been vague about what this means, and so they want to draw on the psychology literature to put the concept of empathy on a more solid foundation. Academic and professional disciplines can be thought of as mini-cultures, so in many ways this is similar to people from one culture trying to borrow or adapt ideas from another culture. And people can have strong feelings about this kind of borrowing, as the recent furor about a Utah teen wearing a traditional Chinese-style dress to prom illustrates (if you aren’t familiar with the story, here’s a news article about it).

• Speaking as a psychologist, what is one thing you liked about how the authors borrowed ideas from psychology?
• What is one thing you didn’t like?

4) A related issue that comes up in the article is the difference between describing a concept in a way that is accurate versus in a way that is useful. Take how the article talks about the difference between ‘becoming’ and ‘staying beside.’ At one level, we could ask which way of describing empathy best captures the experience of real people in the world. At another level, we could ask which way of describing empathy is most useful to designers in their work. And there’s no guarantee that we would get the same answer in both cases. This issue comes up a lot in self-help books, for example, where authors will take the actual science, but then simplify things and gloss over the nuances in order to give people something that they can easily understand and apply in their own lives.

• In your own view, do you think it is a good idea to take findings from psychology and present them to a broad audience in a way that isn’t quite scientifically accurate but which is much easier for people to understand and apply? Why or why not?