"Empathy" in Design is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

Groundbreakin’ this week features Aparna Vinod, who calls herself a very accidental designer and means it. She works across transformation strategy, learning design, and people experience, and somewhere in the margins of all that, she’s also chipping away at a PhD on community emergence, set in Kolar Gold Fields, the town she’s from.

She started in media and communications, drifted into consulting, circled back into to design school, became a design faculty member, and somehow ended up designing culture for companies that didn’t know they needed it yet.

• How Aparna became a “very accidental designer” working across transformation strategy, learning, and organizational design.

• The real unlearning: why designing for people unlike you is a preference, not design.

• Aparna’s Venn diagram framework for design need, strategy, and aesthetic.

• Why she refuses to use the word “empathy” in her practice.

• The TikTok beautician story that reframes who design is really for.

• How redesigning classroom seating became a design act.

• The ROI question: when should a fast-moving startup actually invest in culture?

• Why Anthropic’s “People Scientist” job listing signals where design careers are headed.

Why “Empathy” is a Dirty Word
Ask most designers what they’re taught to do and “empathise with the user” comes out almost on reflex. Aparna doesn’t say it anymore. Not because she skipped the step, but because the word stopped meaning anything.

“I refrain from using the word empathy because it has been beaten to death, thanks to design thinking being the only framework of design that the large-scale corporate world has understood.”

Neither she nor I was ever taught “design thinking” as an actual subject in design school. What we were taught was design; messy, contextual, and a lot harder to put on a slide. Somewhere between design school and the corporate world, the word got flattened into a framework. She’d rather just do the thing than keep saying its name.

The Number That Hides the Truth
I asked her the question every founder eventually asks: What’s the actual ROI of culture?

Aparna’s answer started by taking apart how organizations measure happiness in the first place.
“We conduct surveys and people say, ‘we’re very happy,’ or ‘we’re very engaged.’ We turn that into a number. Then we happily peg the organization to that number, close the conversation, and say: people are really happy here.”

Meanwhile, she points out that attrition may be rising and health outcomes may be deteriorating even as that same score remains stable. Take a nursing institution, for example. It’s a high-pressure environment, largely staffed by women whose work and lives are shaped by pressures that a satisfaction score can never fully capture. Once that lived experience is compressed into a single number, the organization has less reason to keep asking the harder questions, not because they’ve been answered, but because the number creates the impression that they have.

Listening vs. Interviewing
She draws a hard line between the two, and it’s the line most researchers blur without noticing.

“When I interview someone, I’m already going in with an agenda and a set of questions I want answered from my frame of reference.”

Ask someone, “Do you want a yellow screen or a blue screen ?” and you’ll get an answer shaped entirely by your own options. Ask “what apps do you use, what bores you, what are your friends using,” and you get something closer to the truth, because you’re not the one supplying the frame. The unsaid things underneath, she says, are where the actual personas live.

Design as a Venn Diagram, Not a Poster
Aparna’s working definition of design has three overlapping circles: need, strategy, and aesthetics. Aesthetics is deliberately last.

“We can definitely design much better posters than what Canva or any of these tools can do... but is making things beautiful alone enough?”

Once you understand the need and the strategy, she says, the aesthetic space opens up on its own, and it stops being limited to a screen or a poster. It could be a huddle. It could be how a classroom is arranged.
Design stops being an artifact and starts being a decision about how people experience something.Culture Isn’t a Phase-Two Problem
I pushed her on this one directly: why should a four-year-old, fast-moving startup care about culture when it’s still fighting for survival? Her answer didn’t flinch.

“If you don’t set your cultural course early, eventually you’ll be firefighting when everything caves down. And when cultures collapse, one of the first things you lose is trust.”

Most founders treat culture like a maturity milestone, something you afford once you’ve got the revenue to spare. Aparna argues that by the time you can afford it, you’re usually already rebuilding it from the rubble. The economic path and the cultural path aren’t sequential. They’re the same road.

The Job Title That Made Her Stop Scrolling
She’d been thinking about where all this qualitative, human-first design work eventually lands as a career, and then she saw a role posted at Anthropic.

“They called the role 'People Scientist'. In a world where we treat qualitative data as full of emotion and subjectivity, Anthropic has put listening and human beings back into the conversation and said: that is a scientist’s job.”

An AI company, of all places, formalizing listening as a scientific discipline. Even as AI eats into the jobs everyone assumed were safe, some of the biggest AI labs are hiring specifically for the human skills that came before any of it. That’s not a contradiction to her. It proves her argument.

When I asked Aparna what matters most in all of this, her answer was immediate.

“Design beyond the artifact. Don’t limit the skill sets that design gives you to creating a good artifact. Design for the need. Design as a process is what you need to be looking at.”

It’s easy to mistake design for the thing you can screenshot; the poster, the brand identity, the Instagrammable facet of brands. Aparna’s whole career has been a slow walk away from that idea, toward the harder, less visible work: the process, the listening, the culture underneath the product. Most people chase the tangible elements because it’s provable. She’s betting on the process, because it’s the only part that outlasts everything else.

Listen to the full episode on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.

Until next time,
Stay curious, stay Groundbreakin’.

—Dipaq