Toward an Integrated Framework of Empathy for Users among Engineering Student Designers

Nicholas D. Fila; Justin L. Hess; Elizabeth Sanders; Corey T. Schimpf

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Conference: 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Portland, Oregon
Publication Date: June 23, 2024
Start Date: June 23, 2024
End Date: July 12, 2024
Conference Session: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) - Best in DEED
Tagged Division: Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED)
Tagged Topic: Diversity
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/48161

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Paper Authors

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Nicholas D. Fila Iowa State University of Science and Technology

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Nicholas D. Fila is an assistant teaching professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Iowa State University. He earned a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and a M.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in Engineering Education from Purdue University. His research interests include empathy, ethics, design thinking, and course design.

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Justin L. Hess Purdue University orcid.org/0000-0002-1210-9535

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Dr. Justin L Hess is an assistant professor in the School of Engineering Education at Purdue University. Dr. Hess's research interests include exploring empathy's functional role in engineering and design; advancing the state of the art of engineering.

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Elizabeth Sanders Purdue University

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Dr. Elizabeth A. Sanders is a Postdoctoral Research Associate at University of Illinois Chicago. She holds Ph.D in Engineering Education (Purdue University, 2024), a M.A. in Higher Education (University of Michigan 2020), and B.S. in Chemical Engineering (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign 2018). Her research focuses on human-centered design teaching and learning in the engineering context and empathy in engineering design.

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Corey T. Schimpf University at Buffalo, The State University of New York orcid.org/0000-0003-2706-3282

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Corey Schimpf is an assistant professor in the Department of Engineering Education at University at Buffalo. He is the Division Chair for the Design in Engineering Education Division (DEED) for the American Society of Engineering Education 2024 annual conference. His research interests include engineering and human-centered design, advancing research methods, and technology innovations to support learning in complex domains. He has a PhD from Purdue University in Engineering Education.

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Abstract

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.

Citation
Format

Fila, N. D., & Hess, J. L., & Sanders, E., & Schimpf, C. T. (2024, June), Toward an Integrated Framework of Empathy for Users among Engineering Student Designers Paper presented at 2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Portland, Oregon. https://peer.asee.org/48161

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - 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.

AU  - Nicholas D. Fila
AU  - Justin L. Hess
AU  - Elizabeth Sanders
AU  - Corey T. Schimpf
CY  - Portland, Oregon
DA  - 2024/06/23
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Toward an Integrated Framework of Empathy for Users among Engineering Student Designers
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/48161
ER  -