Why use Empathic Design research techniques?
Companies like Apple, Motorola, Xerox and Intel have integrated anthropologists into their corporate personnel. Their goal is to apply ethnographic skills, employed by anthropologists, to watch, interview and videotape consumers. Analysis of these collective observations provides the insight required to define new product concepts what will be valued by the consumer.
"The context is really critical," says Jean Canavan, an anthropologist who is the manager of culture and technology initiatives at Motorola. "If we want to develop technologies that really fit into the way people live their day-to-day lives, then we have to understand how people really live."2 Many anthropologists work with a concept called embodied knowledge -- tacit, nonscientific knowledge -- and look for ways to incorporate such information into product design. Embodied knowledge is "basically the intelligence in your muscles."3
Anthropologists and empathic design teams are trained to pay attention to minute details that can often be overlooked. Paying attention to such "embodied knowledge" helped Matsushita build a better bread maker in 1987. The company sent a team of engineers to be apprenticed for several months to a master bread chef at the Osaka International Hotel in Japan. The magic ingredient turned out to be a special maneuver the chef executed with his hand while kneading the dough, so the engineers figured out how to mimic the movement with the machine.4
Canon introduces color printers for consumers' household use. Sales were not as high as expected: the consumer was unsure how they could use such a product. Canon sent empathic design teams into customer's homes to observe how printed materials were used. They looked at refrigerator doors and bedroom walls. The result was the highly successful "Canon Creative", bundled software that creates greeting cards, t-shirts and posters, the items observed by the teams as predominant in homes.5
2 Hafner, Katie. Coming of Age in Palo Alto. New York Times On The Web. June 10, 1999.
3 Hafner, Katie. Coming of Age in Palo Alto. New York Times On The Web. June 10, 1999.
4 Hafner, Katie. Coming of Age in Palo Alto. New York Times On The Web. June 10, 1999.
5 Hafner, Katie. Coming of Age in Palo Alto. New York Times On The Web. June 10, 1999.
