RESOURCES
Empathy Mapping
When it comes to social and cultural change, empathy mapping is particularly useful because it helps sensitize you to the people or groups at the center of the issue itself.
Empathy Mapping for People-First Solutions
As a tool, our empathy mapping process offers a series of prompts to help identify a target group's thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, and needs. As you summarize their “perceptual world” - their thoughts, feelings, actions, and experiences - you begin to better understand the world from their perspective. This shifts the focus from the solution to the people who will benefit from it. This shifts the focus from the solution to the people who will benefit from it.
As we identify what the community or group wants and needs, we gain a more holistic idea of their culture, norms, beliefs, values, needs, and desires, and even their worldview. This then allows us to design ideas and solutions that respond to their needs rather than our own.
Like product and design-based approaches, our Empathy Mapping Process is a simple mapping exercise that helps you to think from someone else’s perspective. It allows you to better understand different issues, strongholds, and contexts from the perspective of the people at their center, so you can love them and respond to their needs more effectively.
Through empathy mapping, we are able to gain answers to the following questions and more:
PERCEPTION
What does this population perceive about the world around them? What are they seeing, hearing, and thinking?
ACTION
What are they doing? What are their motions and reactions? How are they physically interacting with the world around them?
FEELING
How do they feel? What are the underlying emotions for those feelings?
NEEDS
What are their goals and needs? What are they trying to achieve?
Hopefully, you can see how empathy mapping can be a useful tool when you need to see something from someone else’s perspective. This includes family members, friends, neighbors, clients, and colleagues.
