Supporting Empathy Engagement throughout the Design Thinking Process

Katherine Brichacek; Ordel Brown; Laura Maria Pigozzi

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Conference: 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Baltimore , Maryland
Publication Date: June 25, 2023
Start Date: June 25, 2023
End Date: June 28, 2023
Conference Session: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) Technical Session 6
Tagged Division: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)
Page Count: 13
DOI: 10.18260/1-2--44360
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/44360
Download Count: 127

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Paper Authors

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Katherine Brichacek Northwestern University

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Dr. Katherine Brichacek is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northwestern University, where she teaches in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences and McCormick School of Engineering. Her current research is at the intersection of engineering education, ethics, and social philosophy.

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Ordel Brown Northwestern University

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Dr. Ordel Brown is an instructional professor at Northwestern University in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science, where she currently teaches first-year engineering design courses. Her research interests in engineering education include first-year engineering experience enhancement strategies, retention of underrepresented groups in engineering, and inclusion and equity in engineering design.

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Laura Maria Pigozzi PhD Northwestern University

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Dr. Laura Maria Pigozzi holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Scientific & Technical Communication with a doctoral minor in Bioethics. She has taught professional communication since 2010, first at the University of Minnesota and, since fall 2018, at Northwestern University. Prior to her academic career, she has worked as a R&D engineer, a technical writer, and a business owner.

Dr. Pigozzi’s research stands at the intersection of the rhetoric of health and medicine, technical and professional communication, intercultural communication, and immigrant health.

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Abstract

Engineers play a vital role in delivering mitigatory effects to wicked problems. However, conventional engineering education relies overwhelmingly on well-structured problems and design challenges and does not prepare students to adequately address wicked problems. Not only are wicked problems daunting and difficult for engineering students, tackling such problems requires unconventional approaches such as an awareness of positionality and sustained empathy in engineering design. While the engineering design process contains the concept of empathy, it is not always explicitly, consistently, and intentionally emphasized.

Drawing on scholarship from the philosophy of empathy and engineering education, we employed a care and virtue ethics based approach to explicit and intentional empathy instruction in our first-year engineering design curriculum. The curriculum charges students to address wicked problems such as the challenges and inequities faced by people with disabilities. We modified our first-year engineering design thinking course to include activities that encourage students to think of empathy as a skill, a site of learning, and an attitude via engagement with two kinds of empathy: self-oriented and other-oriented. Self-oriented empathy activities promote empathy as a competence that is learned through listening, naming nonverbal cues, and perspective taking. Other-oriented empathy activities enable students to identify and expand their socio-cultural awareness, and grapple with and disrupt biases. More specifically, to encourage consistent, active learning around empathy at different stages of the design process, we created assignments that ask students to reflect on their positionality when tasked with self-oriented and other-oriented empathy exercises. These metacognitive exercises encourage students to recognize the impact of their design choices beyond their own lived experiences.

In the first phase of our research, we used multi-method approaches to capture students’ positionality and measure the impact of positionality awareness on shifts in empathetic tendencies. This work-in-progress paper focuses on the initial results from this exploratory phase. They highlight a limited positionality and showed several consistent themes around students’ empathetic practices based on perceptions and attitude towards the role and importance of empathy throughout the design process.

Citation
Format

Brichacek, K., & Brown, O., & Pigozzi, L. M. (2023, June), Supporting Empathy Engagement throughout the Design Thinking Process Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. 10.18260/1-2--44360

TY - CPAPER
AB - Engineers play a vital role in delivering mitigatory effects to wicked problems. However, conventional engineering education relies overwhelmingly on well-structured problems and design challenges and does not prepare students to adequately address wicked problems. Not only are wicked problems daunting and difficult for engineering students, tackling such problems requires unconventional approaches such as an awareness of positionality and sustained empathy in engineering design. While the engineering design process contains the concept of empathy, it is not always explicitly, consistently, and intentionally emphasized.

Drawing on scholarship from the philosophy of empathy and engineering education, we employed a care and virtue ethics based approach to explicit and intentional empathy instruction in our first-year engineering design curriculum. The curriculum charges students to address wicked problems such as the challenges and inequities faced by people with disabilities. We modified our first-year engineering design thinking course to include activities that encourage students to think of empathy as a skill, a site of learning, and an attitude via engagement with two kinds of empathy: self-oriented and other-oriented. Self-oriented empathy activities promote empathy as a competence that is learned through listening, naming nonverbal cues, and perspective taking. Other-oriented empathy activities enable students to identify and expand their socio-cultural awareness, and grapple with and disrupt biases. More specifically, to encourage consistent, active learning around empathy at different stages of the design process, we created assignments that ask students to reflect on their positionality when tasked with self-oriented and other-oriented empathy exercises. These metacognitive exercises encourage students to recognize the impact of their design choices beyond their own lived experiences.

In the first phase of our research, we used multi-method approaches to capture students’ positionality and measure the impact of positionality awareness on shifts in empathetic tendencies. This work-in-progress paper focuses on the initial results from this exploratory phase. They highlight a limited positionality and showed several consistent themes around students’ empathetic practices based on perceptions and attitude towards the role and importance of empathy throughout the design process.
AU - Katherine Brichacek
AU - Ordel Brown
AU - Laura Maria Pigozzi PhD
CY - Baltimore , Maryland
DA - 2023/06/25
PB - ASEE Conferences
TI - Supporting Empathy Engagement throughout the Design Thinking Process
UR - https://peer.asee.org/44360
DO - 10.18260/1-2--44360
ER -