Engineering Management Research Lab

Engineering healthy organizations

The EMRL is a pioneer in offering Empathic Design Training from an engineering perspective. This experience is best suited to engineers and marketing staff in R&D units. Why make stuff that your competitor can easily duplicate? Develop products that customers don’t even know they need, using our Empathic Design techniques.

Empathic Design Training

We are engineering professionals drawing upon the best work in empathic design so you can use it in your organization. We won’t lose you in social science jargon. We will help your staff transform how they obtain and use information from the life cycle of use—all those who touch the product.

Ethnographic Foundation &
Engineering Pragmatism

· Triggers of use

· Interaction with the user’s environment

· User customization

· Intangible product attributes

· Unarticulated user needs

(Source: Leonard & Rayport, 1997)

Discover Key Ethnographic Information

For more information on these services:

E-mail: larry.mallak@wmich.edu or
call 269-276-3369

Understand the Life Cycle of Use

Many R&D studies rely on Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC). While valid, VOC doesn’t usually produce the big breakthroughs surfaced by Empathic Design. Exploring the life cycle of use of a product shifts the focus to other than the end-user, opening up potential new product development opportunities.