Empathy.

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Empathy is a crucial ability to understand other peoples emotions and seeing things from their point of view. If you can put yourself in someone's shoes, you are essentially attuning yourself to their own feelings. This can be difficult, though it is generally much easier for one self. However, this is not a universal response to the emotions of others. We continually practice empathy in every circumstance so that it can better help us not only to be better people, but to be better builders.

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Design Thinking.

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Design thinking is not exclusive to designers. In fact, many great innovators have practiced it. It is so popular that it is being studied at the university level at places such as Harvard and MIT. So, what IS it exactly? It is the process in which we seek to understand the people for whom we design products/services. It involves ongoing experimentation that keeps trying out new concepts and ideas--because hey, the market is constantly evolving, right?

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Relationship between the two?

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Having design thinking in our arsenal, we can observe and develop empathy for our clients, as it helps us in the process of questioning problems, assumptions, and implications on how we build our product. We figuratively place ourselves in our clients' shoes: Would we live here? Would we enjoy this home? Will we be happy here? Is it built to our every want and need? These are just some of the questions that we illicit when starting each and every one of our projects. By tackling problems in human-centric ways, we create many ideas that come to fruition in a way that satisfies many peoples needs.

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