Design Empathy and Contextual Awareness

Wayne names three things: stories that show how design shapes society, interviews and advice from working designers and educators, and design tools offered in a guided, personal way. Many books describe methods and tools, he notes, but tend toward encyclopedic completeness. This one is about a practitioner’s view of how to apply which tools when, and what the pros and cons of each are.

“Curating a student’s usage of the tools is more important than exposure to each and every last one,” says Wayne.

Design students, young professionals and aspiring entrepreneurs. Wayne draws on business theory such as disruptive innovation and the technology adoption curve, and reframes it for the design practitioner. The book is meant to be accessible to a creative audience, not only to MBAs, and to help readers think like a business owner and approach the choices of mass production with new respect.

Wayne’s aim is to go beyond studying people. The book gives visual, digestible tools that help practitioners apply empathy in practice: developing prototypes and engaging stakeholders, not just researching them. He credits Dev Patnaik and Michael Barry for shaping his own early learning in empathic design research.