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Expansive Empathy: Defining and Measuring a New Construct in Engineering Design

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Conference

2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Location

Minneapolis, MN

Publication Date

August 23, 2022

Start Date

June 26, 2022

End Date

June 29, 2022

Conference Session

DEED Technical Session 10: Empathy and Human-centered Design

Page Count

12

DOI

10.18260/1-2--40722

Permanent URL

https://peer.asee.org/40722

Download Count

325

Paper Authors

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Ardeshir Raihanian Mashhadi University at Buffalo, The State University of New York

biography

Vanessa Svihla University of New Mexico

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Dr. Vanessa Svihla is an associate professor at the University of New Mexico (UNM) with appointments in learning sciences and engineering. Her research, funded by an NSF CAREER award, focuses on how people learn as they frame problems and how these activities relate to identity, agency and creativity.

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Abstract

Empathy is vital to ethical, effective design, yet vexing to teach. While research suggests empathy can be developed through human-centered design, students still tend to narrowly scope design problems, ignore the heterogeneity of the stakeholders, and focus on only mainstream or very few individuals with specific needs. While engineering education has come to value empathy, literature suggests that we still have a very limited understanding of its nuances. We address this issue by introducing the construct expansive empathy, which we define as the ability to understand and generate inclusive design solutions that incorporate the complex interactions among the engineering system and the needs of diverse stakeholders, including those who are marginalized, mainstreamed, and vulnerable. We adapted the Interpersonal Reactivity Index to develop a measure to capture expansive empathy and performed an exploratory factor analysis. We examined factor structure using data collected at the beginning of a senior design class. Initial results suggest that students have not developed expansive empathy in their previous engineering courses.

Raihanian Mashhadi, A., & Svihla, V. (2022, August), Expansive Empathy: Defining and Measuring a New Construct in Engineering Design Paper presented at 2022 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Minneapolis, MN. 10.18260/1-2--40722

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