The Empathic Design Hall of Fame

People Who Embrace Our Precepts

Empathic Design principles animate work in and outside the digital world.

Some of the planet’s greatest industrial and digital designers have advanced the Empathic aesthetic with iconic, life-changing work that affects all of us.

Here is a baker’s dozen of our favorite Empathic influencers – and as you’ll see, they put the Empathic idiom to work in a lot more than websites. If you find this honor roll incomplete, send your own nominees in to us here at the Institute.

Philippe Starck (1949 - )

French designer-influencer who’s applied his “democratic design” sensibility to at least 10,000 people-friendly places, spaces, and objects, from restaurants to stacking plastic chairs to e-bikes. Democratic design in Starck’s hands means “well-designed objects that are not just aimed for upper-tiered incomes.” “An object must be useful before being beautiful,” says Starck – just as a beautiful but unusable app or website is the opposite of Empathic.

Jina Anne

Self-described “design systems advocate” and organizer of Clarity, the premier design systems conference in San Francisco. Jina was lead designer on the Lightning Design System at Salesforce and led the CSS architecture and styleguide for the Apple Online Store. “I'm super passionate about design systems, design tools, and design processes,” says Jina on her site, sushiandrobots.com. “But more importantly, I’m passionate about collaboration and improving communication; I'm passionate about community and people. It’s why I love design systems in the first place. Because design systems are for people.”

Edward Tufte (1942 - )

No influencer has done more to make people appreciate good data visualization design. He self-published his landmark work, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1982), when unable to arouse interest from a conventional publisher; it remains in print to this day, beloved for its wisdom on such issues as “chartjunk” (useless, uninformative data graphics) and the “data-ink ratio” in quantitative information displays. Tufte is a longtime critic of PowerPoint as a promoter of simplistic thinking.

Harry Beck (1902-1974)

Empathy for lost Londoners led Beck to design the then-revolutionary London Underground tube map in 1931. The map’s basic syntax has held fast through 90 years of expansion and updates and been ripped off by countless other urban rail systems. Tube maps until Beck were confusing messes of sprawling curlicues, mirroring reality, but when Beck put himself in the customer’s shoes, he realized reality was irrelevant to navigational clarity – all that mattered was the stations’ relationships to one another. His map was – and remains – an extremely usable schematic “map” of London, and a daring act of design Empathy.

Ethan Marcotte

An independent web designer, accessibility champion, and tireless promulgator of “responsive web design” – a country cousin of Empathic Design. Marcotte’s core design principles were first offered in 2010, when issues were first surfacing of designing for numerous devices and browsers, and remain just as relevant today. “Fluid grids, flexible images, and media queries are the three technical ingredients for responsive web design,” says Marcotte. “Rather than quarantining our content into disparate, device-specific experiences, we can use media queries to progressively enhance our work within different viewing contexts.”

Iina Vuorivirta (1988 - )

Perhaps the most influential designer at Ikea, the Swedish housewares giant. She’s known for her minimalist yet striking approach to consumer goods like vases and bottles appreciated by millions worldwide. “I was so happy when I was asked to design a new dish-washing brush for the basic range at IKEA,” said Vuorivirta, a native of Finland. “I love making design that many people can benefit from. So, I set out to make the best dish-washing brush ever... Since my products will be used by so many people, I feel a great responsibility to get it right.”

Jonathan Ive

“Jony” Ive is roundly acknowledged as Apple’s greatest product design influence. He was lead design engineer on the 1998 iMac, the first iPod, and the form factor for the first iPhone. We do not always remember how much like science fiction these Apple products were when first introduced, nor what a high-touch revolution in tech design they represented. Ive left Apple in 2019 to found an independent design consultancy called LoveFrom, which tells you all you need to know about his Empathy quotient.

Bill Hill (1949 - 2012)

Hill was a pioneer in screen typography; he was one of the inventors of Microsoft’s ClearType system in the 1990s, but his influence on our screen experience spanned a quarter century. Hill’s achievements, wrote an admirer at his death, “were rooted in a respect for our humanity and a desire to make our tools work for us. He considered the most important operating system to be not Windows or Linux, but "Homo Sapiens Version 1.0...There’s no upgrade in sight. But it’s the one that runs everything.”

Alec Issigonis (1906-1988)

In a bygone era of autos as gigantic land yachts, Issigonis designed the tiny but iconic British Mini around essential user needs. Amid a gas shortage, he was asked to come up with an affordable car, no more than 10 feet long, that could transport four people and deliver at least 40 mpg. The 1959 Mini was his answer – a product so fundamentally pleasing and beautiful, it was driven by rock stars and working people alike, remained in production for 41 years, and sold 5.3 million copies. It is possible that no example of mass industrial design was ever more loved.

Sarah Parmenter (1984 - )

Contemporary UK web designer injecting feminist sensibilities into historically male-forward interactive culture. With Adobe XD, Sarah developed the “Little Pink Book,” dedicated to making “lady-networking non-creepy, fun and somewhat cool” and to “celebrating the power of female friendships through dual storytelling.” “Communication plays a much bigger role than skills or anything you can learn,” says Sarah about her work. “If you are starting out, it’s important to have enough skills to know what you’re talking about, but to also understand that a heck of a lot of what we do is communication-based.”

Raymond Loewy (1893-1986)

Perhaps the 20th century’s most influential designer of everyday things, responsible for the sinuous curve of the Coca-Cola bottle, the streamlined postwar grandeur of the Greyhound Scenicruiser, and Moderne refrigerators for Sears, Roebuck. Loewy made a longhaul bus exciting to ride and consumer goods exciting to use.

Michael Graves (1934-2015)

The designer who brought a Museum of Modern Art aesthetic to cheap teakettles anyone could buy at Target. His design shop put its Empathic mark on more than 2,000 products. Beyond housewares, Graves was also an accomplished architect; his work for The Walt Disney Company was dubbed “entertainment architecture.”

Dieter Rams (1932 - )

Lead design officer 1961-95 at Braun, the German consumer products company, where he became famous for his “less, but better” approach and his Principles of Good Design. According to Braun, good design is: innovative; makes a product useful and understandable; honest; thorough down to the last detail; and minimal. Sounds Empathic to us. Rams was responsible for beautiful lighters, shortwave radios, and calculators.