“Dev Patnaik”
Dev Patnaik, Founder and Principal, Jump Associates talked about How Your Business Can Prosper When You Create Widespread Empathy at March 5, 2009 @ Rotman DesignWorks, Toronto.
Empathy is giving up a self-centered world and walking in others’ shoes. It is related to the concept of mirror neurons or reciprocal altruism: Neurons fire not only when we actually do (e.g., playing basketball) but also when we simply see (e.g., watching basketball game) or hear (e.g., hearing basketball sound) and further, people treat others as they want to be treated.
He proposes that empathy is important for designers. See Nike and Harley Davidson. If we apply empathy to business, we can even find which firms are highly empathic or not.
His talk was very interesting. In fact, I became curious about when empathy works and when not, how we know when it is does not benefit, and how to overcome the problem. For instance, B&O’s designers do not listen to their customers but focus on their own inner voices and successfully innovate their products. Dev suggested that to overcome the dark side of empathy, we should empathize not with a single person but with multiple groups of people. This is interesting. None of prior research on empathy or perspective taking has not considered multiple targets. Further, it opened up more important questions: when designers empathize with very different groups of people, which groups should be and actually be considered more importantly?
I saw you started blogging from facebook.
I recommend you to read my friend’s blog as well.
http://www.palojono.com/
He works with Dev at Jump and graduated last year from UC Berkeley.