In design, empathy is the ability to understand another person's experience (their needs, emotions, and constraints) from their perspective, not our own.
Design thinking has made this its very first step: before designing, understand. Tim Brown (Change by Design, 2009) and the IDEO school popularized the idea that we design better for people when we start from their experience rather than our assumptions. Specialized tools formalize this, such as the empathy map (Dave Gray), which categorizes what the person says, does, thinks, and feels.
Yet, empathy has a flip side that design often overlooks: putting ourselves in someone else's shoes risks replacing their perspective with ours. Psychologist Paul Bloom (Against Empathy, 2016) demonstrates how empathy, by its very nature, projects: we feel what we would feel in that situation, which is not necessarily what the other person is experiencing. The more certain we are that we "understand," the more we stop listening.
This is the tension between proximity and projection. Proximity brings us closer to real experience, while projection covers it with our own. A designer who has never taken public transit at 6 AM, never filled out a social welfare application, or never used a service with a disability will believe they "understand" and will get it wrong, despite having the best intentions in the world.
The antidote isn't more empathy, it's more field research. We anchor empathy in observation and ethnography: watching what people actually do, not what we imagine they do, nor even what they say they do. Empathy becomes truly powerful when it is treated as a discipline of inquiry, rather than just a sentiment. Understanding others begins by accepting that they are not us.
Where to explore further: ethnography (testing empathy in the field), insights (what we take away), the empathy map and the persona (the tools that formalize it), human-centered design (the guiding framework), and cognition (what separates feelings from reality).
References: T. Brown, Change by Design (2009); P. Bloom, Against Empathy (2016); D. Gray, empathy map (Gamestorming).
Rémi
Gréau
Director of Design
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