How our emotional asset - empathy - can lead us to acting and thinking sustainably (and sometimes not), together with Julia Lohmann, Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design, Aalto University
Why do we suddenly want to help others as we put empathy glasses on? Why do we feel like saving the world, but don't always act on it?
With Julia Lohmann, a multifaceted designer & Contemporary Design Professor from Aalto University, we are set to explore the role of emotions in our lives, methods to empathise effectively, and steps needed to rethink existing value chains.
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1.
The great sufferers of commercial whaling, humpback whales, have shrunk in number to mere 1,200 in 1960s, making them an animal at the edge of extinction. Today, as a result of incredible human action and policy making, their numbers have climbed up to 21,000, and still growing.
This is an important feat for battling climate change, as a single great whale absorbs 100 times more carbon dioxide than a single tree annually. And where whales are, there's phytoplankton - another superweapon to battle the greenhouse gas.
Whales play a critical role in restoring marine ecosystem as well as maintaining an equilibrium in environmental sustainability altogether. Surprisingly though, these were not the properties that made whale conservation campaigns successful.
2.
My name is Anastasiia Kozina, and you're listening to The Dot, a podcast about building a sustainable mindset in design and tech. Let’s navigate complexity and address the unknowns - all for better practices in sustainable innovation.
3.
Whales are difficult not to relate to. They're capable of building complex societal structures and culture by learning from one another. They have unique ways to communicate based on geographic location. They're using those social structures and tools to survive. Killer whales often create strong waves to wash a prey off the ice floes, and humpback whales are known for creating bubble nets to encircle and trap their prey. Whales also show signs of human-like "sense of morality", which is quite unique for foraging animals. Sperm whales have sonars to find fish, that, if used at full blast, could permanently deafen others nearby, yet they chose not to abuse their abilities. Amazing, right?
To top it off, some whale species have developed spindle neurons, a type of brain cells only found in rare kinds of animals, such as dolphins, apes, elephants, and not surprisingly us, humans. There are other similarities in brain structures, but let's wrap up by noting that whale's brains are also built for social action and self-aware consciousness.
These unique properties and intellectual similarities in whales raised ethical concerns in global society, and called for recognition, consideration, and protection of endangered whales. Even though the concept of human-like similarity in whales is entirely absurd, it helped to make whales easy to relate to, and brought a great outcome - the whale populations are being restored, and so are marine ecosystems and environment.
We tend to listen when something alike us is in question. And we turn a blind eye to the problem when the similarity is missing. Why does this happen?
I think emotions are very important because we can have all the knowledge we need for something. If we are not emotionally invested, we don't care. And then we don't act because it needs care to act. So I think this is also a great power that design has that somehow, there's always this emotional aspect as well as the intellectual one.
This is Julia Lohmann, a Professor of Practice in Contemporary Design from Aalto University, a mother, and a highly-skilled designer who dedicated her life to challenging the status quo of the value chain of materials and food we consume daily.
I like to introduce myself as a designer because I think the design is such a powerful discipline that in a way it's so close to society and so close to people that there is a big power to change the world through design.
4.
Daniel Batson, an American social psychologist, conducted a study that involved a 10-year-old girl Sheri with a fatal disease. Like many other children, Sheri was placed in a queue awaiting treatment. Daniel Batson used this opportunity to try and nudge his study subjects to move Sheri further in the queue. One group had to objectively analyse the situation, while another was asked to imagine life with a disease from Sheri's point of view. The latter group - the one asked to show emotional empathy - unanimously gave Sheri a treatment priority.
Empathy can help us navigate through complex topics by bringing a new rational perspective to the table. It paves a way to make better decisions as it opens a new variety of views. Sadly though, empathy quite frequently clouds our judgement and leads to bad decisions, too. A number of studies show that we feel empathetic to people like ourselves, making racial & gender bias unavoidable. In decisions that concern human integrity and life, using empathy as a guiding star raises profound philosophical concern - favouring some people over other is highly immoral, even though we are programmed on a neural level to do so.
Nevertheless, we are living in a world where empathy is step one in the majority of design methodologies available today. Design thinking is a process for creative problem solving that inspired a Double Diamond framework to appear. You might recognise it in Human-centred design by IDEO, Design Sprint by Google, Lean Service Creation by Futurice, and a number of other methods across companies. It's simple, adaptable, and encourages organisations to understand their customer needs first in order to create effective final product. During this stage designers try to step into the customer's shoes, conduct contextual study and problem interviews, all leading to the idea why customers behave in certain ways and how your product can help them get what they desire.
I think empathy plays a big role in design, and I think this is also why I'm still a designer, because as a designer, there is always another you are referring to, you're designing for, you're taking into account.
You're not a designer if you just do something for yourself. There's always an outreach and trying to understand something from another viewpoint.
I think in these times we have to extend our empathy a little bit. I don't think human-centric design, for example, is still kind of the right frame.
I think we have to go further and think of non-human stakeholders who are just as important or more important depending on, you know, where we engage with our design.
Sadly, such studies usually result in subjective results due to the amount of interpretation involved to build first set of assumptions to proceed with design. This is not too scary though, since lots of assumptions are being validated in latter parts of the design thinking process, and even more when large amounts of data is collected on product usage and behavioural patterns by the organisations. Actually, data can help us empathise more rationally, if it could be put this way.
I like to keep the ties to design so that we actually understand them as design and that we are surrounding ourselves, not just with objects that please ourselves and that make ourselves more comfortable, but also with some of the things that challenge us.
Every design that's done today is contemporary design. But do we understand it as trying to figure out how to be relevant in the 21st century through design? Like how can we develop design methods that are able to address the challenges we face in this century, in this millennium. And in contemporary design, it connects both materiality and developing materials, but also, you know, craft and design as well as critical thinking and conceptual development.
5.
The bad news is that empathy doesn't end there. Naturally, empathy leads us as close as possible to making a whole variety of decisions about something or someone, but the game changes one we sprinkle a bit of complexity on top of that. That's why we feel perplexed when faced with a choice around climate change, refugee crisis, or data economy. Our minds are just not built to deal with complex problems that involve a large variety of actors and factors. We aren't programmed to act on anything distant and abstract. We might even say that we're not built to deal with modern problems.
Paul Slovic & Daniel Västfjäll, XXX, has been focusing on difficulties in decision-making in charitable giving. Their studies concluded that people might be inclined to send money to an individual person in need, but might they learn that more people need similar help, they get less likely to donate at all. Slovic refers to this as "a fade of compassion". The poet Zbigniew Herbert called this “the arithmetic of compassion”. In scientific circles, this is referred to as "pseudoinefficacy effect" - a cognitive bias that "numbs" our decisions when we face a problem that touches a large number of people. That's when we feel like our action towards a problem are too small when presented against a broader context and scope, so we start feeling that there's going to be no impact from our actions, and we just don't act. Sounds familiar?
This illusion of ineffectiveness is what blocks us from gaining agency and acting in a moment. That's why sometimes we decide on something against our set of values, justifying anything within our reach and convenience instead.
A UK design researcher wrote about it, Jonathan Chapman is his name, and he wrote about, emotionally durable design. And he said, we have to have less one night stands and more longterm relationships with the things.
So he advocated that if you're in the shop, you always ask yourself, can I have a longterm relationship? It's not about the 10 year old this thing costs, but do I want to give this thing a permanent place in my life? And if the answer is no, then I should really think whether I should take it home or not.
So I think this is the personal level on whichever one can make a big change. Then there is a next level which is becoming aware of the systems we are tied into and thinking and not despairing when doing so.
in 2007, I was designed in a residence in Japan, in Northern Japan and Hokkaido. And I was especially interested in over fishing and in tuna fishing.
There's very often also done in the Mediterranean and the EU legislation doesn't really protect the tuna in a way it should. So I went up there to work with this, but I built, in the end, a large installation of empty boxes from the fish market. But I also found the seaweed on the fish market and I couldn't believe that it's not being used as material for making, because the materiality is so wonderful.
It's so, like, lush and grows six meters long in a year and it's quite wide. And when you think of how much labor and chemicals go into making a leather of that size, and you think, well, the seaweed I can just pull out of the ocean and it will have done, it will have just had a positive impact up until the moment I take it, what if I can just use it like this? And I think that's kind of fascinated me so much that now 12 years later, I'm still working with the seaweed.
I think this is the power there is with seaweed that you can actually farm it in a way that benefits the ecosystem. And then that makes me think what if we look with every material we produce, not just to do no harm or do little harm, but to actually try and improve the ecosystem.
But that reaches all the way into kind of policymaking and into these kinds of things. And currently in many countries, at least in the EU, there is not much legislation around seaweed farming, for example.
There's a great opportunity in being aware of both empathy and pseudoinefficacy effect, as together they can create a ripple-effect of positive decisions. Especially social responsibility companies as well as teams that deal with ground-breaking innovations can and should benefit from taking human moral constraints into account. Telling strong stories has been a way to unite people since the dawn of humanity. There’s a great deal of potential in using analogical thinking when exploring or presenting a product to various stakeholders. In today's heavy attention economy, breaking through the crowd to change people's perception around a topic is hard, but entirely possible with the right methods.
So we did a project with some students, where we went to Kristineberg research station in Sweden and we worked at the Marine biological research station looking at the scientists and what comes out of the research station. And then thinking how we can connect that to society.
Like basically we had one scientist there, Sam Dipran. He was working on ocean acidification and he was saying, well, everyone who reads my paper already knows this, but how can I reach further? And he, in a way, employed design strategies by cooking shrimps off the future that have lived in acidic conditions as in 2030 and 2050 and feeding it to people and saying, look, your shrimps will not taste the same. And suddenly he had mainstream media.
He had a mainstream understanding of, Oh my God, something seems to be going on on the sea and an interest and a stage that is far beyond the academic paper papers.
6.
You might remember pictures of Alan Kurdi, a Syrian boy who's drowned body was later photographed on the beach and became a symbol of "refugee crisis". That picture alone finally brought a global response that no news about thousands of people dying in Syria could achieve. As a result, chancellor Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to refugees, and numerous other countries modified their refugee policy. Anyone can relate to a child that went through awful death, hoping to start a better life.
In business, we tend to focus on numbers and scale. Our limits in cognitive abilities call for a change in our strategies to help our customers' minds wrap around modern problems that they're just not suited to deal with! I'd love to think that assistance to make right decisions, suitable for unique context and culture, is the new responsibility that lies in hands of modern companies today.
So there is one point that is lying within each person to become aware of that value and to act accordingly.
Basically, when you look at the objects that surround you, think of how they came into being. Think of the labor. Think of the transport. Think of the materiality.
Think of the oil that was in the ground for thousands, if not millions of years before coming to you in the shape of a plastic bag. And the minute you think into that system that comes with the object or that the object is embedded in. You perceive an unbelievable value with everything around you. And with that value comes a responsibility for them.
It's kind of painful to then see things that are still good being thrown away because of the embedded energy in them. And because nature was taken to make that thing. So with it comes a responsibility to make good use of it.
Now, yesterday or today, I read that the workers of Amazon have in thousands gotten up and asked, demanded for Amazon to become more sustainable.
And I think this is exactly what you can do and look within the system as an insider of any system, you will be come aware of what possibilities for change there might be and then trying to make them happen.
7. Credits
This episode was delivered to you by a small team of Ian Gaplichnik, technical producer and creator and host, yours truly, Anastasiia Kozina. Music by Yo La Tengo and Ian Gaplichnik. Special thanks to our guest Julia Loihmann for her unique and challenging points of view. Thanks for being at The Dot!
Remember to follow The Dot Podcast through your favorite listening platforms - we are available via Apple & Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Deezer and others. Stay tuned for more content and updates through our website on thedotpodcast.simplecast.com. New episodes from The Dot are available for your ears every other Monday. Till next time!
8. Cliffhanger
In a way a planner centric designer, I would say it's more of a generalist that has the ability to have critical thinking, and to work within a complexity and to go beyond a linear process to embrace the complexity of systems.
It takes a lot of patients to be a planet centric designer, I guess it does for anybody, but there are some conversations that you'll have that can be very difficult. It's not like, it's not just business. We're not just talking business here. We're talking about tightly held beliefs that need to be adjusted and like navigating that is really difficult.
In our next episode, we’ll navigate the complexity of global systems and imagien world without
fear for tomorrow together with a new generation of designers - planet-centric designers - Carolina Faria and Andrew Matias from Vincit, a digital transformation company.
Make sure to be at The Dot! In your ears on Monday, 17th of February.