Reflections on Empathy Mapping II
Written by Hannah Munnalall
I have always been a lover of the scientific method.
It all began in my Grade 9 chemistry class. I grew up in a small Central Asian country at an even tinier school that had few qualified teachers. My chemistry teacher was a parent of one of the students at the school, and to teach us about chemistry, she simply gave us chemicals and sent us outside to “try to blow things up.”
As you can imagine, the lack of organization and processes that were involved in this chemistry class felt chaotic and unacademic to me. This experience impacted me so much that I wasn’t sure that I even liked science until I got into a university science classroom and experienced order, process, and method. I grew to love being in the lab following scientific procedures, discovering tiny bugs in a sample of pond water or synthesizing a certain chemical compound. I love knowing the order of events that I need to follow, and watching it systematically play out.
When I was approached by my supervisor (Dr. Clements, Ph.D.) about joining an interdisciplinary group that would work together to tackle a research interest of mine (Bohemian knotweed), I was excited. I thought that I would be able to contribute my scientific expertise and then move on from there.
But, boy, was I surprised! Instead of that, I was encouraged to engage with a group of students to use creative methods, such as empathy mapping, research participant mapping, media scans, backcasting, etc. to solve problems that knotweed presents to the public. These methods are far from the systematic, ordered process that I had come to love. Although it was difficult to use these methods at first, I began to use them to explore knotweed further and come up with potential solutions to the problems we were seeing in the field.
Although these creative methods opened up whole new worlds of possibilities and research, I want to focus on my first “breakthrough.”
A different perspective
One problem we have been trying to solve as a team was the public perception of the problem. Unfortunately, the only known effective control method for knotweed is through repeated herbicide (usually glyphosate) application, generally over a period of five years.
However, no matter how often we, as scientists, tell the public that getting rid of knotweed is supporting the growth of the native environment, many groups of people protest herbicide application for the negative impacts it may have on the environment. Knotweed is incredibly persistent and dangerous for our economy, human infrastructure, and local fauna…so how do we communicate that to people?
While I was empathy mapping, I started to think from the perspective of the knotweed. As a researcher, I have always thought of knotweed as an evil invader. However, the more I thought about it (and empathy mapped), I realized that maybe knotweed isn’t the bad guy.
Humans brought knotweed from its native habitat of Southeast Asia to North America, and all it’s doing is trying to survive. I realized that perhaps there was a way for us to communicate with people and tell the story of how we brought knotweed to North America, and it is now our responsibility to take it out. We aren’t destroying the ecosystems, but instead restoring the environment.
Although this definitely is not a solution to all the knotweed problems, this shift in perspective and focus opened up a whole new world of possibility to me. I had a different vision, one that wouldn’t have been conceived simply by sticking to the scientific method.