Why We Make Things. Because We Could Empathize With It — With the Product, and With the Story Behind It.

I once asked a certain veteran photographer a question.

“What moment makes you press the shutter?”

“Im, you know, I fall for it almost right away. So I press the shutter the moment the subject starts to feel dear to me.”

Hearing that stopped me in my tracks.

Thinking back on it, when I ask myself what actually drives me to make things, it comes down to this: because I love the client’s product or project, I end up thinking about it as if it were my own, and I throw myself, almost desperately, into figuring out how to make it succeed.

Lately I find myself remembering, often, how much that master’s words made sense to me.

“The capacity to empathize.”

I’ve come to feel, more and more, that this might be an absolutely essential capacity for anyone doing client work.

Some of that empathy comes intuitively, out of your own life experience — but that alone isn’t enough to make something your own. To empathize, you have to know it. To know it, you have to experience it. Not just see it or hear about it, but carve it into your body as lived experience.

Even though I wasn’t conscious of it at the time, empathy has been the driving force behind my client work. Looking back, I think that to earn it, I was talking, listening, and communicating as hard as I could, sharpening every one of my senses to actually experience the thing.

What we do is design. And if design, at its root, is about solving something, then you can’t arrive at the right solution unless you define the problem and set the goal from a place of empathy.

Through empathy, you define the problem and search for a way in toward solving it. I’ve come to recognize, all over again, just how important that starting line is. And I’ve come to believe that for as long as I can go on empathizing, I can go on making things — with that as the drive behind it all.