What personal grief taught me about empathy in Service Design
Grief is a deep emotion common to all of us and unique to each individual's context, environment, and history.
Through my recent experience of grief, I realized how essential practicing true empathy is to design. We don’t always know how to properly engage in roles where we want to be truly emphatic. Assumptions need to be left aside to connect to the part of us that knows that feeling, to fully observe, engage and immerse.
Designing for grief
A memorial honoring those killed in the 2015 Charleston church shooting in South Carolina is an example of a space designed to bring humanness to the service experience.
By embodying what was most valuable – the names of the deceased – the service became more personalized. Together with Brooklyn studio, Pentagram designed a custom-made typeface inspired by the hand lettering on the church's stained-glass windows. The typeface took part in telling this story of grief by making it more specific to those lives – their names now resting permanently engraved and forever honored.
Source: yello.substack.com
What is empathy in Service Design?
Emotions matter in Service Design. It ensures a holistic approach in line with the emotions tied to the service, while also acknowledging their uniqueness to the person.
Services operate within roles aimed for a specific objective, while ensuring a person-to-person service to bring humanness to the interaction. Context, values, and history play a big part in the experience.
The service blueprint is used to visualize and fully understand the users' context and emotions, not only during the service transaction but also before and after.
Emotions shape us as individuals and play a defining role in our life experience, yet they are hardly talked about. We are not particularly curious about observing and truly understanding them.
Empathy is the ability to share another person's feelings and emotions as if they were your own. There are two differences, though. Emotional empathy is when you feel the other person's emotions alongside them. Cognitive empathy or 'perspective taking' is being able to put yourself into someone else's place and see their perspective, but without necessarily engaging with their emotions. This latter one is where Service Design operates.
As a rule, to practice genuine empathy, we need to let go of our assumptions and biases and start from a clean slate. This applies both in research during the Design Thinking process and when engaging in face-to-face service transactions.
In both cases, empathy is applied through three main approaches: observation, engagement, and immersion.
Observe the body language, the context, and the environment.
Engage by listening and acknowledging the feelings of the other. Ask questions like What? How? Why?
Immerse by connecting first to something in yourself that knows that feeling.
One way is to use analogies. For example, the highly stressful and time-sensitive procedure of operating on a patient in a hospital emergency room can be analogous to a process like refueling and replacing the tires of a race car in a pit stop.
Another way to immerse oneself is through bodystorming by acting out to physically experience a situation and immerse oneself in the users' environment.
Image source: www.partnersinleadership.com
What can grief teach us about empathy?
As a Designer, I am aware of the importance of applying empathy in my work and personal life. In general, I have always had the impression most people and I use empathy in a somewhat inherited way when interacting with someone feeling something we haven't experienced – or have experienced differently. Then grief occurred and made reconsider my assumptions.
I recently experienced deep grief after the passing of a close relative and became curious about my experience. Not only how it unfolded for me but concerning others.
Grief is defined as keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss; sharp sorrow or painful regret. So, it would be safe to say we all experience grief in our lives somehow.
As essential as it is to everyone's life experience, our society generally avoids talking about death and grieving. Through my experience, I understand how unique it is and how empathy and knowing the right thing to say and do – which often doesn't come naturally - plays a crucial role.
According to an article by the New York times on What to Say (and What Not to Say) to someone Who's Grieving, these main pointers guide a proper reaction to a grieving individual:
It's not about you
Friends and acquaintances want to talk about their losses or how your loss affects them.
I found myself listening to everyone's loss and grief stories when I just wanted to talk through mine, which was unique and had nothing to do with theirs.
I appreciated people asking questions about my deceased relative and expressing genuine interest to know them through me.
There is no bright side
When you've lost someone you love, you're in a raw place. Nothing anyone can say is going to cheer you up, especially observations that begin with the words, "At least."
I found myself listening to people saying things like, "Imagine the people that have relatives disappear and don't even know if they are dead or still alive" or "The good thing is she didn't die tragically."
Let them feel
Don't tell a grieving person how to feel. They may need to be vulnerable. They may need to cry for days on end. In other words, don't say things like, "Be strong."
I would suddenly need to cry in the oddest moments, and I was thankful that my feelings were acknowledged and respected.
It is often more about being truly present and engaged than by saying "the right thing."
Personalized rituals
A common emotion like grief is an opportunity to understand and truly connect with others' individual experiences.
Rituals, such as memorial services, are adapting to the changing trends and offering a greater variety of options. They are planned ahead of time to avoid dealing with logistics during the days after the loss. And they can be more customized to reflect the deceased person and honor them. They can be close in line with the individual's life, spiritual or religious values, and they can be interactive or experienced from a distance.
Image source: blog.funeralone.com
These rituals are essential to the grieving process. My family and I had to grieve my deceased relative at a distance, as we were stopped from traveling due to the current pandemic worldwide.
We spoke to the priest and explained how our relative was profoundly religious and strongly connected to her family and friends. He prepared and held a service in line with her life experience and spiritual beliefs via a video conference, where all her loved ones could connect and be present. We were able to talk and share stories, cry and laugh together in an informal and friendly environment, just as we did when my deceased relative was alive. This allowed us to feel she was adequately honored and let us move on with our grieving process.
In brief, emotions play a crucial role in Design. They define us and how we experience the world.
In Service Design, cognitive empathy allows us to put ourselves into someone else's place and see their perspective. It is a fundamental approach to service interactions and the Design Thinking process, and yet not much different from the empathy we experience in our personal lives.
Emotions, in general, are hardly acknowledged or addressed. Grief is a deep emotion common to all of us and unique to each individual's context, environment, and history. Through the experience of grief, we understand that when engaging in a role where we want to be truly emphatic, we need to leave our assumptions aside, connect to a part of us that knows that feeling, and fully observe, engage and immerse. This way, we can generate accurate insights, and ultimately design and deliver memorable services that connect with the audience.
Let us embrace grief to understand each other better and truly connect.
Written by:
Juliana Romero, Designer and Project Manager
juliana.romero@thepoint.fi
Books used for guidance:
Lara Penin (2018), Designing the invisible
Articles:
https://yello.substack.com/p/designing-a-typeface-for-the-mother
https://www.helsinkidesignweek.com/feature/design-can-create-happiness-for-future-funerals/
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/design-thinking-getting-started-with-empathy