Empathizing with engineering

Empathy is an essential element for practicing good design which delivers value for an intended audience or market. To design effectively is to design with a committed sense of deep awareness and care for the that audience’s goals, needs, concerns…from awful frustrations to joyful delights, and everything in between.  

This point is also true, when it comes to designing with a cross-functional team, through the conduit of a shared, common purpose. Empathy is a necessary factor in building key relationships and understanding divergent perspectives that enable a kind of dynamic, creative tension for the whole team’s benefit, towards realization of that purpose. Ultimately it is a human quality that creates social adhesion for fostering trust, engagement, and camaraderie, particularly when arduously working through the most intractable or contentious problems along the way. It all comes down to respect and willingness to see “the other side”, so as to arrive at feasible compromise and viable alternatives that meet everyone’s goals.

This is not easy, in the slightest! Empathy takes hard work, patience and practice, especially when trying to gauge the emotional or philosophical tenor of an inscrutable colleague— or at least an agreeable colleague speaking obtusely ;-)

So how to foster empathy with engineering? Following are some articles that I’ve been reading up to grok engineering principles and practices. To help me truly deeply understand where they are coming from, what their issues and challenges are, what are those fundamental matters that keeps them up. My hope is that by doing this I can be a better designer and foster more team success going forward.

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