Framing the Act of Innovation, as an Act of Empathizing

In my Continuous Improvement journey into the Sales and Marketing field, I have taken Service Design as one of the leading concepts. One of the areas that is most evident in Service Design and Design Thinking is the aspect of Empathy. Seung Chan Lim, nicknamed SLIM has engrossed himself into a special project that I have found rather unique. The project name is Realizing Empathy and below is an excerpt from the upcoming podcast.

Slim: What’s really funny is… Basically, I would almost categorize myself as an empirical researcher. Because as much as I love books and if you come to my place you’ll see so many books, I don’t really read them as much as I probably should. I’m much more of an experiential person. So taking classes and acting is like another way of understanding, what does it mean to act instead of reading a book about it. I decided to just do it. Basically, what I learned in acting class is that it broke my preconceived notion of the idea that acting is pretending. To a certain degree, yes; there is a pretend in it. But by and large, what actors do is they try to bring in their own experiences and bring it into the moment when they’re on stage. But they do it under a frame. They do it under the name of some other character that’s inside a play.

They do it in a situation that is not their own. But what they’re really doing is they’re accessing their own personal experience, triggering them in the moment. So when the audience sees it, they may think it’s the character doing it, but they feel that what they’re doing is real because it is real. They’re trying their very best to be true to themselves.

That’s a very different way of thinking about acting. Because what they’re doing is they’re empathizing both in real time with what the character’s going through, and also before, during rehearsals, they’re constantly trying to understand what it is that this character, this writer has written, is really trying to do because the words don’t really tell you enough.

You have to have gestures. You have to have facial expressions. All these other nuances have to be coincided with the words for it to really work as a remarkable piece of artwork that moves the audience and gets them to think about things differently. It wasn’t until I took that acting class that the word empathy entered into my equation.

Website: http://realizingempathy.com/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/realizempathy/

Slim’s model talks about framing the act of making not as an act of innovation, but as an act of empathizing. The model suggests a new direction for design. It might be quite leap, or is it?