Empathy, More or Less: Scaling Intermediary Experiences of Emotion and Affect in Innovation

Abstract

Questions of scale permeate current approaches to empathy in applied human‐centered work—and especially design thinking—but they have remained largely unquestioned. What is more, empathy has become an empty signifier, and empathizing is often a near‐formulaic and pro‐forma endeavor. To catalyze a reworking of the concept, in this paper I synthesize what has been said so far of empathy and its role in design and innovation, and I take stock of what these contributions point to. I ask: “How can we think of empathy as a scalar phenomenon and thus re‐scale it in innovation?” I offer some illustrative, if unresolved, tensions with empathy I have had in my own ethnographic work with a robotics start‐up, and I conclude the article with a series of provocations with the hope they will be taken up further.