Engineering Students' Utilization of Empathy during a Non-Immersive Conceptual Design Task

摘要

Empathy for users is a critical element when designing appropriate and innovative products, processes, and systems for others. As such, emphasis on empathy in design practice, research, and education has grown in recent years. Immersive projects, during which designers interact with users in their daily lives, can help designers develop stronger empathy towards users, but little is known about the role of empathy in the more constrained design settings common to engineering education. In this study, we explored how engineering students developed and utilized empathy towards users in a time-constrained, non-immersive setting. Eight senior-level engineering students participated in a thirty-minute think-aloud design task for which users were neither specified nor accessible. We utilized a sequential two-part methodology, starting with quantitative content analysis followed by a qualitative thematic analysis approach, to investigate the techniques students used to develop and integrate user knowledge during the design task as well as how empathy manifested during the task. Students utilized 18 distinct techniques to develop user knowledge, identify user-centered criteria, and design and evaluate concepts with users in mind. However, these techniques were largely based on generalized conceptions of users and self-knowledge rather than the nuanced, other-oriented, experiential understanding that characterizes empathic design. The results suggests that specifying a user group and enabling students to interact with prior and proposed design solutions may help engineering students develop and utilize of empathy even when users are not accessible.