BREACH is something I think about when people are talking about using empathy, codesign and living experience in design projects.
It’s a word from China Mieville’s The City and The City. It’s a terrible offence in an imaginary city where two communities, two cultures, two groups of people live in the same physical space but are trained to not perceive the Other. It’s a strange concept and yet it is founded in a human truth.
We are socially entrained to notice what is known and comfortable to us. Other people, other affordances can be imperceivable. In neuroscience there is the phrase “perception seeks usability”. The idea that we only notice what is useful to our intents. That perception is also social and cultural. We often cannot perceive that other people and other cultures can hold the solution that we need. We seek usability but sometimes we cannot perceive it.
This problem is particularly relevant to the professional or institutional perspective. The inability to see how other people, citizens or new users, see.
Breach as transgression
In design, people talk about the need to use empathy to shift perspective. To think like the other people and to inhabit their sense of life and place.
However, I still suspect that Breach is a better word.
It’s a transgression.
It is hard for the professional to switch perspective to appreciate living experiences.
It is hard for people to have their living spaces intruded into.
Breach is a deliberate effort. It has the sense of doing something uncomfortable. Empathy hides that discomfort.
I’m currently thinking of workshop tools for Breach now. Making the shift visible. Making the transgression known to both sides.