Stakeholder Perspective Taking
topic
Stakeholder perspective taking is the deliberate practice of inhabiting the viewpoint of each different person or group affected by a situation — understanding the same event, design, policy, or creative work as it appears from the perspective of each stakeholder who experiences it, including those whose perspectives are most different from one's own and most likely to reveal aspects of the situation that one's natural perspective systematically obscures.
Role
Stakeholder perspective taking is the creative practice most directly essential for design that works for its intended users — because the designer's perspective is never the user's perspective, and the gap between how a design appears to its creator and how it appears to the people who must live with it is the primary source of design failures that seemed excellent to their creators. Design thinking's 'empathy' phase operationalizes stakeholder perspective taking as the first and most important step in any design process — establishing that understanding the problem as it appears to those who experience it is the prerequisite for designing solutions that actually address their experience.