Ignorance Beats Empathy

Q: I’m trying to be more empathetic towards the users of the things I design. Do you have any useful advice?

Empathy is a wonderful tool. Not just in our design work, but in life. It allows us to understand things from other people’s point of view. It means we make an attempt to walk in their shoes. See things from their perspective. To put it bluntly, empathy is one of the things that keeps us from being total assholes. It’s also how we double-check that our work isn’t falling into some ethical or moral black hole, by attempting to see how it affects people who aren’t us.

As designers, empathy means we consider the people we design things for. We consider how their interaction with what we make will affect their lives. We consider how well they understand what they are using. And we attempt to be honest about what kind of experience they’ll have. There are several tools designers have developed over the years to help us gain a sense of empathy towards our users, most notably personas, where we attempt to create “real” users. It’s kind of like method acting.

But at the end of the day, we are who we are. And our empathy only stretches as far as our experience can take it. We don’t know what we don’t know. And even if we feel bad for that person who lives on the street, who probably needs healthcare, dinner, and a place to sleep, we only feel bad about it for a few steps on our way home. And then we return to our lives.

And as empathetic as we might be, we are hopefully aware that the world worked out pretty well for us. After all, empathy is expensive and only available to you if you have the time to feel it. Other people are too busy surviving. And we have to admit that the world, as designed, works more or less in our favor. (Yes, I am fully aware that I am a white-adjacent dude writing this. And that our mileage varies wildly.) So as much as we talk about disruption, we don’t really want to disrupt things too much.

But what if that wasn’t the case? What if you woke up one day and found yourself on the other end of the stick? Let’s get philosophical about it…

You’re less likely to advocate for slavery if there’s an actual chance that you might be one of the slaves.

In 1983, the great American philosophers Randolph and Mortimer Duke ran a study where they switched the lives of two men, one well-to-do, the other down-on-his luck, to see whether a world designed to succeed for one would also succeed for the other. They intended it as a study of nature vs nurture, but interestingly enough once the men’s positions were reversed back, the once-again well-to-do man, now having been at the short end of the stick, started making different decisions. Shaken in his entitled beliefs, he was now designing a world where he was unsure of what position he might be in tomorrow. Obviously, we are talking about Trading Places. One of my favorite movies. And a wonderful introduction to both Eddie Murphy, and a philosophical concept called the veil of ignorance.

What’s a veil of ignorance? Great question. In short, a veil of ignorance is a way of determining whether something you’re making sucks by allowing that you may end up in any possible relationship to it.

Here’s Wikipedia’s excellent example:

…for a proposed society in which 50% of the population is kept in slavery, it follows that on entering the new society there is a 50% likelihood that the participant would be a slave. The idea is that parties subject to the veil of ignorance will make choices based upon moral considerations, since they will not be able to make choices based on self- or class-interest.

Get it? You’re less likely to advocate for slavery if there’s an actual chance that you might be one of the slaves. Now, I doubt anyone here is an advocate for slavery. So let’s bring it back to things more in our wheelhouse.

Imagine, if you will, that the leadership team at Uber woke up tomorrow to find out that they were no longer the leadership team at Uber. Instead they were now drivers. And not only were they now beholden to the decisions they’d made as the leadership team, but they were also unable to change those decisions. Because those changes are above a driver’s pay grade.

Or imagine that the leadership team at Airbnb woke up tomorrow as a lower-class immigrant family being served an eviction notice because their landlord did the math and decided he could make more revenue by renting their apartment out as a short-term rental. Would they wish they could revisit some of the decisions they’d made as the leadership team of Airbnb? I hope so.

Or imagine the teams that manage online harassment at any number of social networks. Imagine they wake up one day, no longer working at those companies, and being contacted by former stalkers or abusers. Imagine them having to go through the same process as so many of their users do every day.

If any of these groups were given the chance to go back to their old lives for just one day I guarantee you they would design their products differently. And that’s what a veil of ignorance is all about. It’s about designing a system where you could ultimately be getting the shit end of the stick. Empathy is about trying to put yourself in other people’s shoes in an existing system. The veil of ignorance helps you create a just system, which is a different thing. And it might cause you to design things just a little bit differently. Just a little bit more fairly. It’s the single most important political and ethical concept in a designer’s toolbox.

It’s not enough to disrupt a thing, you have to disrupt it the right way. You have to design the right thing.

(Much thanks to Kenneth Norton and Ross Floate on this one.)

Mike Monteiro is a nice guy or a total asshole depending on your opinion. He is also the Design Director at Mule Design. And the author of Design Is a Job and You’re My Favorite Client.