2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Empathy is a multi-faceted construct that has played an increasing and increasingly varied role in engineering design education. Whether at practical, philosophical, or developmental levels, novel connections between empathy and engineering design continue to be identified. Still, engineering faculty often struggle to prioritize empathy in engineering coursework. For example, a recent study identified tensions engineering design educator experienced in defining empathy, identifying how it should manifest among students, how it is valued in engineering, and how it might be best integrated in engineering coursework. One particular challenge may be in resolving conceptualizations of empathy from a variety of domains (e.g., neuroscience, developmental psychology, design) and contextualizing these conceptualizations within engineering learning spaces. Yet, the state of empathic development among engineering students would benefit from a “common language” that incorporates established knowledge from the variety of relevant domains and considers the unique needs and contexts of engineering learning. Toward that end, we synthesize key empathy frameworks from different disciplines with recent engineering design education studies to work towards an integrated framework of how empathy for/with users manifests among engineering students engaged in design.

The ongoing development of this framework has followed an iterative process inspired by co-design principles. Through several phases, the framework has evolved through a negotiation between the practical knowledge and experience of engineering design educators and students (practitioner-designers) and the interdisciplinary theoretical knowledge and synthesis of engineering education researchers (researcher-designers). During each phase, the researcher-designers synthesized research and scholarship relevant to empathy for users in design, and brought this synthesis to practitioner-designers, who were engaged in the creation of an artifact or knowledge deliverable related to their unique context, i.e., create a practical application and interpretation of the researcher-designers’ current empathy framings. The researcher-designers would then analyze dissonance between their framings and the framings evidenced by the practitioner-designers and their artifacts to formulate new strands of inquiry and contextualizations of their prior framings. The researcher-designers would then re-engage practitioner-designers newly contextualized framings and repeat the cycle.

The integrated framework is built on three premises, which have both theoretical roots and demonstrated pragmatic validation among the practitioner-designers: (1) empathy for users occurs across the design cycle in several design stages (e.g., needfinding), (2) different empathy types (e.g., imagine-other perspective-taking) are relevant in engineering design, and (3) the empathy types manifest in distinct ways across design stages. This paper will report on (a) the co-design framework development process to this point; (b) the current understanding of empathy-relevant design stages, framing of empathy types within engineering student design, and manifestation of empathy in each stage; and (c) discuss questions and implications for theoretical empathy research and engineering design learning based on the integrated framework.