An exploration of the role of empathy in engineering design education
Open Access
- Author:
- Alzayed, Mohammad Khaled
- Graduate Program:
- Industrial Engineering
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 02, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Scarlett Rae Miller, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Scarlett Rae Miller, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Jessica Dolores Menold, Committee Member
Christopher Daryl Cameron, Outside Member
Christopher Carson Mccomb, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Christopher Carson Mccomb, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Steven James Landry, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- empathy
engineering education
design
creativity
teams - Abstract:
- Empathy is a potentially impactful part of the design process because it can help engineers relate to the end user by identifying what and why certain experiences are meaningful. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities. These efforts align with the recent push to transform engineering education from having a sole focus on technical skill development to the creation of ‘holistic engineering education.’ This approach emphasizes the development of engineers who are able to engage with a broad range of stakeholders, understand different cultural expectations, and develop affective disposition skills. While there have been some recent efforts to identify interventions that could impact empathic tendencies in engineering design, there is limited evidence on how students’ empathy develops over the course of an engineering class project and what factors impact this development. Additionally, research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance, particularly during concept generation and selection. This is problematic because teamwork is an essential component of engineering education due to its ability to promote problem solving and improve the exploration of the solution space. However, without an understanding of the role of team empathy in design, it is unclear when or how to intervene in engineering education to create empathic teams. In order to fill these research voids, the main objective of this dissertation was to identify the factors that contribute to the building or waning of empathy in engineering design education and the subsequent impact on engineering design performance. Specifically, this dissertation aimed to: (1) explore the development of students’ empathy development, and the underlying impact of the design and educational context on that development, (2) understand the relationship between student empathy and design outcomes, and (3) investigate the impact of the empathic composition of teams on design outcomes. This was accomplished through an experimental study with more than 100 students in four sections of a first-year design course and a computational simulation study of more than 10,000 teams. The results from this dissertation highlight that students’ trait empathy and empathic self-efficacy did not increase across the design project and the context of the design problem did not have an impact on students’ empathy development. Interviews with the course instructors identified several constraints in the applications of empathy building-activities in an engineering design project. The insights throughout this dissertation urge design education researchers to not rely solely on students’ perceptions of their empathy since the results from this dissertation found that students’ perceptions of their empathy development did not align with the empirical results. A more detailed analysis of students’ activities during concept generation and selection revealed that empathy might be useful in different ways during different design stages. When devising pedagogical interventions in engineering education, this dissertation suggests that interventions geared toward increasing empathic concern are favorable during concept generation while the design community should refrain from evoking personal distress during concept generation. Meanwhile, during concept selection, the findings recommend triggering perspective-taking tendencies to allow designers to select elegant ideas. Finally, this dissertation provides recommendations for composing teams in engineering design education. Specifically, the findings from this dissertation call for the importance of identifying which outcome (overall creativity, elegance, usefulness, uniqueness) is desired, and thus encourage instructors to compose teams based on the empathic tendency (fantasy, personal distress, perspective-taking, and empathic concern) these outcomes are impacted by. This dissertation highlights the complicated nature of empathy in design and call against a one-size-fits-all view of empathy in design, and hence urge engineering educators to compose teams and design interventions based on the results presented in this dissertation. Taken as a whole, this dissertation presents one of the first and most extensive empirical investigations aimed at formalizing the role of empathy in engineering design education. The pursuit of such a formalization is critical given the need for soon-to-graduate engineering students to engage with a broad range of stakeholders in their future careers. Without understanding when or how to prepare those graduating engineers to be empathic in engineering education, the graduating engineering workforce could fail to understand the needs of diverse users and subsequently fail in solving those users’ problems.