A Collaborative Inquiry into Tensions between Empathy and Engineering Design*

Empathy has received increased attention for its role in engineering design. While research on empathy in engineering and engineering design is still relatively new, there are already several definitions or models of empathic design for engineers. Moreover, there are a variety of ways that scholars have integrated empathy into engineering design curricula. In this study, to better understand how instructors can integrate empathy into engineering design curricula and unveil the benefits, opportunities, and challenges of its integration, eight engineering design instructors formed a collaborative inquiry (CI) group. In CI, members act as researchers and participants to collectively explore their experiences with a topic of interest. The participant-researchers of the CI group for this study formed out of a larger project that seeks to create a model of empathy in engineering design and instrumentation to assess the model’s manifestation in students’ engineering design experiences. In this larger project, several tensions emerged related to empathy’s integration into engineering design education. In response, we formed the CI group to address the question, ‘‘What tensions are experienced by engineering design researchers and educators regarding the construct of empathy in our educational practice?’’ Tensions recognize that problems or challenges may have two or more responses. The CI team met six times to identify tensions regarding empathy in engineering design as experienced in their teaching practice. Through our collaborative inquiry, we generated a model that represents our understanding of these tensions. The model included ten themes, which included four empathy frames (definition, value, manifestation, and pragmatics) and six intersections between these frames. Our results share insights from our discussion on five of the ten themes. We close the paper by reflecting on the model and the process of building the model. We offer that the model can be useful for other design instructors to integrate empathy into their curriculum and practices for thoughtfully responding to these tensions. We hope this work can help extend and facilitate ongoing research on empathy in engineering design.