Empathy & Leadership

I'm not a Catholic, but I love Pope Francis for his deep empathy and true leadership.

(From the Guardian's live coverage of Pope Francis's visit to the U.S., Sep. 27)

Meanings

There are just a few stories I’d like to share, along with some thoughts and questions related to what we as designers do.

Story 1, 9/25/15

A woman approached the hospitality desk to ask if anyone had turned in her new TracFone, which she had lost while waiting for the bus with several other Shalom Community Center (a local non-profit organization serving the homeless and extremely poor) patrons. I turned to Bob (pseudonym, same for other names below), an experienced fellow volunteer. He told me it’s rare that lost cell phones make their way to Shalom’s lost and found bin because they are highly desirable. I asked the woman to describe her phone. She referred to it as an “Obama phone,” which I later found to be based on a government-subsidized cell phone program for low-income Americans. I then left a note in the lost-and-found bin in case her phone ends up getting turned in. She was quite upset when she realized her phone might not be returned to her.

Image source: http://www.obamaphone.com/

Mike, another Shalom patron who often appears around the hospitality desk area, was also there today. He, too, lost his cell phone recently. He didn’t seem as upset, but I recall seeing him use his phone quite a bit in my previous shifts.

Story 2, 9/8/15

When I arrived at Shalom, I found several volunteers at the hospitality desk - more than what the work there would require, so when I saw Mario - the volunteer who oriented me during my first shift -  work with someone else in Shalom’s family room, I asked if I could help. He welcomed extra helping hands.

It turned out they were clearing out stuff from several long-term storage bins that had not been checked by their owners “for months and months” (in Mario’s words). Given how tight the space at Shalom is (see picture below), it's necessary to do this every so often.

The bins on the left-hand side are long-term storage bins. Image taken by author on 9/25/15.

I was told to set aside paperwork in a separate bag for each bin, and put everything else in large clean trash bags. The useful things would then be sorted and used by other patrons.

Almost right away, questions popped into my mind. Where are the owners of these storage bins? What happened to them? What if they come back to retrieve their belongings? What do these things mean to them?

I thought of a “Visual Thinking Meaning and Form” course assignment from last semester. It was to use photos and short descriptions to inventory personal belongings of special meanings to us. The things we chose to include ranged from books, notebooks, clothes, to electronics, paintings, crafts, etc. Such were the things I cleared out from those storage bins, only that the cell phones I emptied all appeared broken.

What does it mean to be homeless? How does it feel to have a roughly 2’x1.5’x1.5’ bin for perhaps all of one’s “long-term” belongings? What does “long-term” mean for these people? Why are broken cell phones kept in these bins?

A woman’s bin I emptied had a craft that appeared to have been made by a child, plus some paperwork and personal items that seemed to belong to the woman’s kid. What is it like to be homeless or in extreme poverty with a child? How might the child grow up?

“What’s in my bag”

Different from the previous two stories, this one is not something I personally experienced. It’s a blog post about what refugees carry with them by an organization called “International Rescue Committee.” Again, it reminds me of the said “personal inventory” assignment, only this one is much more poignant.

Among the six bags presented in this post, we could see cell phones in four of them (top four bags below). One of them (top left) even includes a cell phone charger without a phone. One can only imagine the painful stories these refugees must have experienced.

A mother	A teenager
A pharmacist	An artist
A child	A family

Source of images: https://goo.gl/acZdkQ

What do these stories mean for designers?

In design research, extreme cases often afford us insights in ways that the other cases don’t. For refugees and people living in extreme poverty, cell phones seem like one of the things many of them hang on to. What is the meaning of cell phones to them? Is this meaning shared by more well-to-do people? If not, why not, and what’s the difference? If so, what is the meaning beyond cell phones’ trendy, glamorous, and fun facade? And, does it mean cell phones as a “thing” have permeated into modern life and human psyche so profoundly to the point that it has become an inseparable part of human existence? What is it about cell phones that has such power? What is cell phones’ influence on human beings’ emotional experience? What are the implications of answers to these questions for designers?