Design, as a discipline, has an interesting relationship with structure. On one hand, no other business function is so nebulous. Design is ultimately about good judgement, aesthetics, embracing and operating within ambiguity, feelings, and more.

On the other hand, to listen to most writing and teaching about design, it seems to be trying its hardest to be anything but that. Designers are taught in processes and frameworks. We're taught a million ways to conceptualize of how design happens, in various forms of double-diamond design process. In UX bootcamps, people are taught that design is the tools in their tool belt: journey maps, sitemaps, personas (don't get me started on how that's taught), to name just a few. Put them together in the right order and voila! Design achieved.

These things have their place. But how we talk about how we do our work matters, and surprisingly absent from the conversation is what I'd argue is the most important part of the design process: the million creative judgements designers make every moment. The rest of the business, and indeed, designers themselves, seem to find that idea uncomfortable. This is partly because the business has made it so, by asking designers to become so grounded in evidence and data—the lingua franca of our peer functions—as to suggest that it was an inevitability that we arrived where we did. A litany of pseudo-process is invented, then, to launder business ideas through the veneer of data-driven processes such that they may emerge adopted by the organization as gospel.

By far the most egregious of these weaponized processes goes by a title so common in design it's practically synonymous: empathy. To suggest that our design does not start and end there is a heresy of the first degree. It is perhaps one of the few universal dogmas to which all designers are expected to subscribe. But it is deeply flawed. Here's why.

But first, what is empathy, really?

Empathy, in a general sense, is "an ability to understand and share the feelings of others." It is principally distinguished from its sibling, sympathy, by its proximity to its subject. Unlike sympathy, which remains removed, empathy is shoulder-to-shoulder, in the trenches. The empath feels—shares—another's pain while the sympathetic ear merely consoles from the ramparts of one's own mental fortress.

In design, empathy is a term that encourages us to design with, not for. Empathy, we're taught, should make us a true user advocate because the line between that user and ourselves has become as blurry as can be.

Does this make our design better?

In short, no.

The world is chock-filled with "empathetic" designers who act directly against user interests. Worse still, like an abusive partner, they ask us to believe their actions are motivated by care. Were this not so, how could there be so many dark patterns in design? How could products that sell user data exist? How could the public become have become so disillusioned with leading companies who employ some of the biggest teams of the best designers?

Simple: nearly any course of action can be reframed in a user-allied "how might we" story. Nearly any business objective can be framed after the fact in a user story contrived exactly to align with what will make the company money. One reason is that lots of people want and think things that are against their interests:

• We need to make a highly-targeted, privacy-invading ads product? → How might we connect small businesses with their audience? How might we help people find the products that are right for them?
• We're selling user data? → We're helping our partner companies build richer experiences for our users. How might we help users find themselves at home, with their data in place, no matter what company's product they're using?
• We're designing a platform to make it easier for non-qualified subprime buyers to get a mortgage for a home they can't afford by packaging those loans as a CDO (the cause of the 2008 financial crash)? → How might we make the dream of home ownership available to as many people as possible, without regard for historic factors that might unfairly disadvantage them?
• We're producing vape pens? → How might we create a more responsible alternative to smoking? Could we create more positive public environments and more convenient experiences?

It doesn't take a designer to produce these rebrands. They're easy. But it does take a designer to solidify their impact as a social good.

Cancer patients are terrible at finding cures for cancer

Proximity to a problem does not inherently enhance your ability to fix it. On the contrary, it sometimes hampers it because the right solution often seems at odds with a user's emotional state.

Those experiencing an issue are often poorly equipped and positioned for the work of change. Imagine, for another example, if we relied on cancer patients to tell us how to treat them. They couldn't possibly know.

Nor would they have the energy to treat themselves if they did. And they'd have substantial bias by their proximity. To ask them to do so would be unproductive but also more importantly, unfair to them. Doctors and lawyers know not to treat or represent themselves for exactly this reason.

Yet we so often ask people less equipped and equally compromised to tell us how to help them, particularly when it comes to design. This is in large part due to the privileged place conventional thinking holds for empathy as an integral—and perhaps the most important—part of the design process.

One example that I run into all the time is a founder, product manager, or CEO asking to reduce friction for users. Often that's useful. But also often, friction is a good thing. Friction is desirable when it prevents users from making hasty decisions that would be better thought-through. When we make Amazon checkout more efficient, who are we really helping? The user? Well, the user wants to buy, and so our empathy tells us to go full steam ahead. But maybe the human brain is not yet ready for a world where anything can be had at the click of a button.

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I’ve been having a lot of conversations lately with friends and colleagues about the role and value of being or becoming proximate to a problem—empathy, as it's commonly defined—in efforts to address that problem. At first glance, it seems intuitive that to work on something, you must first be as proximate to it as you can be. But as some recent discourse has investigated, proximity comes with shortcomings: biases, emotional exhaustion, and shared victimhood that can make it hard to see as objectively as possible or have the most energy to devote to a solution.

Those experiencing an issue are often poorly equipped and positioned for the work of change. Imagine, for another example, if we relied on cancer patients to tell us how to treat them. They couldn't possibly know.

Nor would they have the energy to treat themselves if they did. And they'd have substantial bias by their proximity. To ask them to do so would be unproductive but also more importantly, unfair to them. Doctors and lawyers know not to treat or represent themselves for exactly this reason.

Yet we so often ask people less equipped and equally compromised to tell us how to help them, particularly when it comes to design. This is in large part due to the privileged place conventional thinking holds for empathy as an integral—and perhaps the most important—part of the design process. But given the issues liabilities of true empathy, could this instead be a shorthand that actually describes something different? Could this be redefined?

It has never been more important to make this distinction. As designers, our blind evangelism on the merits of Empathy as a design tool, however well-intentioned, limits our effectiveness by mischaracterizing understanding as feeling.

It suggests that solidarity is the only way that designers add value, and it’s blind to the weaknesses that that exposes us to. And perhaps most impactfully, it operates from the position that design effort, if well-intentioned, is beneficial, despite ample evidence that such an ideal of a bias-free meritocracy of ideas is far from a reality in our industry.

How so?

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