xo, campbell and co.

thinker ♥ design + tech recap by @onwander co-founders

excerpt from field study by keenan cummings of wander

“Empathy is the most important thing a designer can learn:”

This is something I believe designers often mistakenly refer to as ‘taste’.  Being able to synthesize the personal tastes of a large group of people and express that is an act of empathy. Example: Detecting a shaky sense of American identity amidst a growing global culture, mashing that up with a renewed American entrepreneurialism and self-made-man ethic due to a struggling and unsure economy, and expressing that in the form of a bespoke leather wallet or hand-crafted all-American axe has much more to due with empathy than an Urban-Outfittrian mystical sense of taste. Good taste is personal; empathy is universal. 

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