The First Step is Empathy

By Ella Silvas

When asked about the important values and principles that should be used to contribute to good work in the digital equity field, Goodwill Industries of the Inland Northwest’s Project Coordinator Rayanna Tensley states that patience is key. I interviewed Tensley to complete a profile showcasing her work and values, and I found that patience is a crucial part of working toward digital equity. She discussed the types of resources that Goodwill is providing, such as with their digital literacy training programs, and how patience and understanding are requirements for helping and teaching the people that Goodwill serves. In these cases, the people are unfamiliar with and often scared of using the internet and technology, requiring advocates and educators to come at the challenge with empathy.

In design, empathy is the first step of any process. When viewing design as the creative solving of a problem, you can see how empathy plays a role in the design process. When tackling an issue, designers must consider a variety of viewpoints and feelings to get down to the root of the problem before even beginning to ideate a solution or design. With Dear Digital Equity, we were practicing empathy at every step; one example being the “crits” that we held to make decisions on items like our logo and website formatting. In these meetings, teams of students would present their work and ideas and we would then comment on and critique what they were presenting using some guiding factors, a common one being “is this accessible to everyone?” 

It is through empathy that we can see a similarity between design processes and digital equity work. In both fields, designers and practitioners take different experiences and viewpoints into consideration to find and create solutions to problems. These problems can be as big as achieving digital equity altogether, or as small as deciding where a button should go; either way, empathy is at the heart of it.