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Wright & McCarthy, “Empathy and Experience in HCI”

What is empathy?

• putting yourself in someone else's shoes
• relating to someone else based upon shared experience
• definition on p. 638
  From the pragmatist perspective, understanding an other or
  more specifically, ‘knowing the user’ in their lived and felt
  life involves understanding what it feels like to be that
  person, what their situation is like from their own
  perspective. In short, it involves empathy.
• "feels like" as opposed to what someone is thinking

two theorizations of what empathy is

• recognizing, perceiving and feeling the emotion of another
  identification and re-inactment, representation and reconstruction - in order to perceive we have to try to recreate the situation.Focuses on tools designer can acquire to more effectively "measure" the emotions of the user
• intersubjective accomplishment - fusion of horizons
  focus is on the empathy being a shared thing between the designer and the subject - integrating reactions

M&W propose that these can be mashed together but in reality they lean towards the second approach

aesthetic seeing - emphasis is on embedding yourself as a designer into the equation - counters scientific research, hypothesis, testable, repeatable, predictable, empirical, objective, the data speaks for itself.
Fundamentally, there is an attack on objectivity. Objectivity and empathy are mutually exclusive.
Valuational response entails an interpretation that is influenced by the values and experiences of the researchers.

Can the social sciences be modeled on the physical sciences? Many of the methods that have been appropriated have resulted in a backlash - Quine - Two Dogmas of Empiricism. Meaning has a different kind of existence than physical matter (rocks, atoms, galaxy). Charles Taylor - Interpretation in the Sciences of Man - Meaning is not a natural phenomenom and is always relative to a certain perspective which subverts the scientific approach.

M&W do not render the position they are addressing very clearly.

See aesthetic seeing as a form of dialogism. Much of this is influenced by Bakhtin. I imagine a scene out of CSI where the "investigator" is looking at the evidence at the scene as well as putting themselves into the actual scene from the perspective of the victim or suspect. Aethetic seeing does not put the designer or the user above one another in a hierarchical relationship. They are put on a peer to peer relationship - equal footing. The designer sees the users world with the eyes of a designer.

Alternative method - casting a wide net, get way too general. Sees user needs as a way to exploit a product to those users. Discovering markets vs. understanding the market.
Attention to affective and emotional vs. the cognitive.
Relationship between designer and user - suggests negotiation, proposal vs. assuming the relationship. Moves away from formalized methods such as how to design a study, usability testing, etc. which turns research into an "off the rack", "one size fits all" approach vs. customized to the users.

"attuned" - getting a clear signal of the user, harmony, developing a representation of the external reality is more focused on "natural" phenomena. aesthetic design is more bilateral between the designer and user rather than being unilateral as in most physical sciences.

Historically, CHI aligned itself with science. Even when a special issue of aesthetics came out, the overriding approach was to look at it scientifically. This is slowly changing.

How could HCI have gotten away for decades by focusing on the scientific model. This is related to the emergence from second wave to third wave. Workplace analysis was measured for productivity and focused on behavior - physical, observable, measurable actions.

Empiricism is to behavior as aesthetic seeing is to experience. As we move towards the user experience, we need to move away from empiricism to something else that is hermeneutic, dialogic, empathic, creative, subjective and value-positioned.