Co-Creating a Model of Empathy in Engineering Design

This WIP paper describes the development, implementation, and preliminary lessons learned from co-creation workshops with engineering design instructors. Co-creation is a generative process to collect and integrate diverse perspectives and offers a novel approach to engineering education research. Empathy is also a relatively new concept in engineering education, but literature has shown empathy can lead to improved engineering design outcomes. The primary objective of our study is to use co-creation to develop a model that depicts how empathy manifests in engineering design. We engaged in co-creation with instructors at universities across the United States to generate a collective understanding of how empathy manifests across engineering design contexts, and we will use these findings to iterate on an extant empathy in design model. The model will inform instructional assessments and pedagogies for integrating empathy in engineering design, which will enable (1) instructors to understand the extent to which their students empathize in ways that instructors hope they will and (2) have needed strategies to respond effectively to promote empathy's use in design.