Remote research and empathy – from my conversation with Johan Berndtsson
Reposting from Johnan’s newsletter — the newsletter is written in his voice; the italicized portion is a quote from me
Many years ago, after completing my Master’s, I was accepted as a PhD student and moved to Copenhagen to join a European research team focused on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) in complex work environments. While other teams were studying, e.g., subway control rooms in London or ambulance coordination in Paris, Maria Normark and I focused on Air Traffic Control (ATC) in Copenhagen. At that time over 260 controllers, assistants, and supervisors managed roughly 1,500 aircraft traveling through Danish airspace daily, and that number was expected to grow. To manage this increase without risking safety or driving up costs, we needed a deep understanding of their work.
I spent over a year at the ATC center—not daily, but frequently enough to gain a true sense of their work. The insights we gained from just being in their workspace, observing firsthand, were invaluable. When I later transitioned into the private sector, in-person observation became a cornerstone of my work as a designer. My projects led me to farmers in their fields, biologists in forests, chemists in labs, clerks in shops, and soldiers during military exercises. The details—the farmer’s crop listings, the chemist’s notebook, or the sticky notes on a lottery terminal—offered irreplaceable insights, ultimately leading to successful products and services.
Now, remote research is certainly nothing new. It’s been in our toolbox for more than 10 years. However, since the COVID-19 pandemic, it has accelerated dramatically, often at the expense of traditional field studies. It’s been a while since I did any research myself, but I can’t help but worry about what might be lost in this shift.
When I talked about my experiences and concerns with Steve, he added some, perhaps even more important perspectives:
“You describe the scenarios that you go into, and the amount of context that’s there. And I 100% agree with that. But I want to point out something that we talk about less, what happens to us as researchers. While doing this work, we have these experiences: there’s surprise and overwhelm and joy, and just being fundamentally changed. If you spend a year in air traffic control, you’re gonna be changed as a consumer of air travel, but you’re also changed in how you understand that work and those people.
We use the word empathy kind of easily, but think about that. It’s just a big bucket for stuff that gets added to us. And for the kind of research that we can be doing—which is to really richly understand the world in a new way in order to innovate for that world—that’s the aspiration that I have for research.
And then, if we’re wearing the researcher hat, we are also facilitating other people going through those changes; teammates, designers, PMs, tech people, marketers, content producers, you name it. We’re in the organizational culture change business. Every researcher says, “How can I have impact? How can I have influence?” And encourage people to participate is a big one; show them videos, let them come into the Zoom meeting, but boy, take them to the forest, and spend an hour at 6 a.m. watching those people load up their gear or come back at 4 p.m. after walking through mud in boots with insect bites… I hesitate to call that empathy because I think that minimizes it. It changes us, it excites us and frustrates us and confuses us, and it just gives us new things to chew on because we’ve experienced them.
Participant observation is the old buzzword. If you don’t participate, you’re sort of limited. I want to “yes and” what you described. We’re losing all that context, but we’re also losing what happens to us from being in that context. It’s just so important to… being excited about how the world is different than what we assumed. That’s the thing that I feel is lost, that I want to find small ways to incorporate wherever I can.”
Steve’s words reminded me that this shift is about more than losing contextual insights; it’s about losing the transformation that in-person observation brings to the researcher and the team—and, ultimately, the design. “Being excited about how the world is different than we assumed,” as Steve put it, and including others in that excitement, can be the driver you need to move a product or service toward real innovation.
