2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In a sophomore-level multidisciplinary engineering design course at a Kern Entrepreneurial Engineering Network (KEEN) partner university, student teams collaborate with members of the disability community to design assistive devices that create authentic value for their customers. Historically, teams have shown empathy for their users yet often developed their solutions based on what the customer was already doing - resulting in modest, incremental innovations. This semester, a customer advocate introduced a radical disruption to the customer discovery process: students were asked to disregard current customer practices and approach the problem as a blank slate. This request reframed the design challenge, compelling teams to explore unmet needs with a fresh perspective rather than through the lens of existing solutions.

The disruption produced a transformation in student engagement and mindset. Teams demonstrated full ownership of their projects - self-organizing, setting parameters, and defining the scope of work necessary to reach completion. Students assumed multiple leadership roles within and across teams, reflecting authentic collaboration and accountability. The blank-slate approach also catalyzed greater creativity, with teams developing more innovative, divergent concepts that expanded beyond incremental improvement. Moreover, students grew increasingly comfortable navigating ambiguity, recognizing uncertainty as an inherent and productive part of the design process. Most notably, a shift in motivation emerged: students became less concerned with grades and more intrinsically driven to fulfill their commitment to create value for their customer.

To assess the connection between empathy and these outcomes, we administered two validated instruments to N = 50 engineering students: the Wong and Law Emotional Intelligence Scale (WLEIS) and the Brief Form of the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (B-IRI). We analyzed relationships between students' empathy scores and their development of the KEEN framework's "3Cs" of Curiosity, Connections, and Creating Value. This paper explores these findings within literature on emotional intelligence, empathy, tolerance for ambiguity, intrinsic motivation, and the entrepreneurial mindset. The case illustrates how disruption in customer discovery, whether deliberate or unforeseen, can deepen empathy, heighten creativity, and align student motivation with authentic value creation in engineering design education.