Designers such as Henry Dreyfuss—who in the 1950s was still ascending the heights of his influence—should have been the ones to step in, figuring out where the meet-up was between business and user. But even they didn’t have any firm process for doing so, beyond their own intuitions. The question remained: How could you understand what you were supposed to invent, for whom, and why, if you didn’t have some genius with an unmistakable vision for what the world needed? Empathy, which had always been the vague and quirky heart of the design process, hadn’t yet been codified for industry, in a
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