Empathetic Design

Prioritizing neighbors over personal preferences

A few years back, a church in the Western NC Conference was hoping their dinner church could connect with more neighbors. They set aside a day to prayer walk the neighborhood. When they wrapped up they noted that most of the immediate neighbors of the church were businesses that were open 8am-5pm. Their dinner church met at 6pm. They switched the next dinner church to noon (I guess it was a lunch church now) and their numbers jumped up. By walking the neighborhood, they were able to put themselves in their neighbors’ shoes—and realized they were work shoes.

What is Empathetic Design?

Empathetic design (also known as empathic design) is the process of deepening your understanding of your users’ feelings and needs so that you can improve your product. It requires setting aside your own opinions and being open to hearing another perspective.

A book published by the University of Art and Design Helsinki (available for free here) argues:

“In empathic design, the designer has to go through some degree of role immersion, and an attempt to seriously keep her data-inspired imagination in check with empirical data. Research inevitably inspires her, but her research creates more than inspiration: it also creates an empathic understanding that helps her to choose between hunches and concepts.”

All of this research gets us insight into the users’ perspective and allows us to design something they would be interested in.

Conclusion

In my experience with church leadership, we design church with our current members in mind, but rarely consider those who are not yet a part of our church. What would happen if we prioritized our neighbors in the design of our properties, our calendars, and our budgets? It could be transformational. One thing is for sure, this shift would require a great deal of listening.