Phenomenology
Etymology
From Greek "phainomenon," "that which appears," plus "logos," "study of." Though the word had earlier uses, the method was founded by Edmund Husserl in the early 1900s, who urged philosophers to set aside assumptions and describe experience exactly as it presents itself. Martin Heidegger and Maurice Merleau-Ponty later extended it.
noun · /fih-nom-uh-NOL-uh-jee/
The philosophical study of experience as it is actually lived — describing how things appear to consciousness rather than explaining them from the outside.
What it names
A handle for taking first-person experience seriously in its own right — the felt texture of seeing red, dreading Monday, or grieving — instead of reducing it to brain states.
Example
A good design critique is half phenomenology: it describes what the interface actually feels like to move through, moment by moment.
Related idea
Empiricism studies the outside world through the senses; phenomenology turns the lens around, studying the structure of the experiencing itself.