Empathetic Souls

“Empathy is about finding echoes of another person in yourself.”

So how do we find the echoes of another person in ourselves? How do we step in the shoes of another person to feel the way they feel, to experience the emotions that they do? I guess the only thing that we can do is to develop a connection. As a human being, developing connection can be difficult at times. There are a lot of reasons for that. We humans like to live in our comfort zones. A cocoon which we create around ourselves and we think that as long as we are in that cocoon, nothing could go wrong. If our basic needs are taken care for, if we are striving to achieve that basic need, then that is all we need to think about. I mean who cares if our neighbor sleeps hungry? Our stomach is full! Who cares if a street kid does not have clothes on his body? We have stylish clothes on our body! Who cares if a whole family is sleeping on the pavement? Our family has a grand house to live in!

But then, some of us tend to show acts of kindness. We see a hungry man and we provide him with our leftovers. We think that the Almighty is going to be happy with this act of ours. We feel sympathy for such people. We feel that we should do something for them. But an act of kindness is not empathy. It is sympathy. And we don’t know if that sympathy is authentic or  not. Because in order to feel accurate sympathy and compassion, we first need to develop empathy. Sympathy is momentary, empathy is eternal.

I and my friends were once walking out of the restaurant towards our car. We met a boy who stopped us and told us that he was hungry. One of my friend took out a ten rupee note and handed over to the boy. What the boy did next was something you don’t witness every day. The boy handed over the note back to my friend and said that he is not a beggar. He wanted to earn his living by polishing shoes. The only problem was that he did not have money to buy a shoe polish kit. All he was asking us was to get him a shoe box which a local shop sold. He did not ask for money even for the shoe box. He just wanted us to buy the box. I don’t want to share that what we did next. But whatever it was, it was definitely not an act of empathy. This I realized hours later when I was pondering over it. I thought, it was an act of sympathy that I showed. The money would fill his stomach today but what about the rest of the days? Had we bought him a box of shoe polish kit, he wouldn't have had to worry so much about his stomach the rest of the days. Because then he would be actually earning it and not begging. Now this would be empathy that I have been talking about.

Designers need to have this ability to connect, to be able to stand  in the shoes of other people, to be able to have empathy. Now when I talk of empathy here, I really mean it. A designer cannot design an outstanding product or service until and unless he is empathetic towards people and their problems.

As a part of my brief, I had to conduct a research on a given topic, identify a problem and then come up with a solution. Now the given topic was very vague- street furniture. Street furniture are products that are on street to serve a purpose. It covers everything from a post-box to a sign post.

At first, I had really no idea that what did it mean. Street furniture- I thought it might be a furniture which is generally kept on the streets and meant for the people to sit on it. But a little desk research proved me wrong. Street furniture in a broader extent  is a collective term for objects and pieces of equipment installed on streets and roads for various purposes. It includes benches, traffic barriers, bollards, post boxes, phone boxes, streetlamps, traffic lights, traffic signs, bus stops, tram stops, taxi stands, public lavatories, fountains, watering troughs, memorials, public sculptures and waste receptacles. Now street furniture is a very broad term. I went on to observe the streets in order to find something interesting. I started to observe the various street furniture on road and the purpose they serve and what addition could I make to them.

Now street furniture also defines the landscape of a city. It could become the identity of a city. For example, the red telephone booth of London, the blue fire hydrant of Prague and the residential post box of American sub-urban areas. If you look at any of them, you can tell that it belongs to a particular city.

So at first, I decided to focus on something which will define the landscape of Pune city. I started to go more on field trips to observe street furniture which could be developed as such a thing. Now while observing, I saw something which really helped me to narrow down my brief. I saw a person in rag clothes laying down newspaper and preparing for his night slumber on the pavements.

Now this struck a thought in my mind. These unfortunate people live right on the street. They are a part of the urban landscape. So why not a street furniture which was focused for the homeless?

Hence I decided to narrow down my brief to develop a street furniture for the homeless people.

The next stage was to focus my research on the homeless people. I carried out a lot of research on the internet – from collecting data, statistics to asking people to participate in an online survey asking their views and opinions with regard to a street furniture for the homeless.

But the main problem that I was facing was end-user. The irony being that I had two end users. The common crowd and the homeless. The street furniture was meant to be used by the homeless and at the same time were not meant to disturb the street dynamism.

I did a lot of brainstorm sessions. I carried out group discussions with my friends, I carried out interviews with people and yet something was missing. I did not know how a homeless guy feels. I still did not have a feeling of connection with a homeless guy. I still did not step in their shoe and did not try to view things from their point. And a deep thought lead me to say to myself. I am not showing empathy here.

I started to actually observe the homeless people. One of the observation was right there somewhere in my subconscious memory. A memory from the past. So I took a sip from the fountain of my memory to savor it. It was the memory of a homeless guy with big beard and rag clothes whom I saw as a child, each day on my way to school.  This man use to lie all day on the divider or sometimes a midst a pile of garbage scavenged by pigs and stray cattle. I never got to know what his story was. But as a child it left a deep impression on my mind. I always felt a feeling of pity for the poor guy and also use to wonder how did he end up in such a state?

78 million people in India are homeless. The government shelters are not enough to tackle this situation, Moreover, it might provide solution for a beggar but not the working class of homeless because the working class homeless does not want to mingle with the beggars fearing that he might catch some disease.

Keeping these points in my mind, I came up with an idea of a street furniture which serves the need of the homeless guy. This idea is not to relocate these people but to provide them with a night shelter which they can use at night and vacate in the morning. Rather than designing a product, I designed a whole system for the near future which could be created to provide night shelter for these people.