Mauro Porcini

“Empathy is nothing more than the capacity to understand the person you are innovating for in an authentic and profound way. It represents the phase in which the designer gets into the mind and spirit of that person, reading the person’s emotional signals, taking on the person’s subjective perspective, analyzing motivations, observing behavior and reactions in an objective and rational way, without being influenced by the designer’s own personal bias. When a designer manages to get into the head of the user and takes on the user’s perspective, the designer can then understand the user’s needs, desires, ambitions and fears, and thus design the ideal solution that takes all of these particular variables into account. In brief, in the process of design and innovation, empathy is the ability to understand what is relevant to the user.”
― Mauro Porcini, Human Side of Innovation: The Power of People in Love with People