Designing with Empathy: Turning Small Crises into Meaningful Solutions

By Jutismita Hazarika & Bao Nguyen

When we hear the word ‘crisis’, we naturally imagine a collective, large-scale disruption such as the COVID-19 pandemic or global warming. However, a crisis can be personal and silent too. In the context of design thinking, a crisis (huge or small) is an opportunity to recognise those unarticulated challenges and reiterate our problem-solving approach. A crisis becomes a human challenge in design thinking. It is not a solely technical or operational challenge (Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020). At the core of this process of incorporating emotions, motivations, and unarticulated needs into innovation, lies empathy, an element that shifts the focus from abstract problem-solving to lived experience sharing (Norman, 2023).  

The Design Thinking masterclass with Katja Tschimmel enabled us to explore this dimension of design thinking in a practical context.  

The Crisis and the Human-centred Solution 

As a team, we tried to create a process inspired by the infinity framework for design thinking by adapting an infinite loop for generating ideas, developing a concept, prototyping, testing, and iterating on it. Subsequently, it became clear how empathy influenced the loop. Moving on to the problem, we identified a crisis: the “crisis of motivation”, faced by international students in Finland. A new country, academic challenges, the unfamiliar climate, and cultural adjustments can often demotivate students. This challenge may sound insignificant, but it can be very disruptive for a student as well as an educational establishment’s legacy. We identified that the problem was the lack of emotional resilience required to thrive as an international student. As Liedtka (2020) views design thinking as a social technology, we embedded the same concept into our design process. Hence, we consciously avoided using any digital tool and created a University Reward Program (non-academic). This felt more personal, and human as compared to building an app. Empathy transformed our crisis response into a solution for creating a human-centered impact. Thus, empathy was a part of the process and not just the outcome (Liedtka, 2020; Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020). 

From Ideas to Tangible Solutions 

To visualise our design concept, we turned to prototyping, a core design thinking process. We used LEGO pieces to build a physical representation of our idea, transforming our abstract design thinking into a tangible model. Visualising concepts helps to simplify complex ideas and allows for better feedback. This is a critical step, as it helps the team to learn, iterate and build confidence (Cankurtaran & Beverland, 2020).  
 
Our LEGO model became a practical tool. It helped to overcome the crisis by visualising a “reward” system, where students could collect “points” by participating in multiple activities such as tutoring, recycling, volunteer work. The points could be afterwards redeemed for benefits like new badges, field trips, shadowing a CEO etc. The idea was to motivate students to take part in activities and feel included, a process that is not competitive but helps learning, collaboration among the people involved (Liedtka, 2020). 

When Empathy Becomes the DNA of Innovation 

Innovation does not always need a technological solution. Sometimes, the most powerful innovations are the ones that reshape human interaction. Our design thinking journey showed that a human-centred approach is not just a method, but a mindset. It is about shifting focus to understand and address the needs of others, to build a more resilient and empathetic world. By starting small and focusing on the experience, we can contribute to a design thinking culture where empathy becomes the very DNA of how design thinkers solve the world’s problems together.  

References 

Cankurtaran, P., & Beverland, M. B. (2020). Using design thinking to respond to crises: B2B lessons from the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. Industrial Marketing Management, 88, 255–260.

Norman, D. A. (2023). Design for a better world: Meaningful, sustainable, humanity centered. MIT Press. 

Liedtka, J. (2020). Putting technology in its place: Design thinking’s social technology at work. California Management Review, 62(2), 53–83.