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1. Research Initiation: Enhancing the Learning Outcomes of Empathic Innovation in Biomedical Engineering Senior Design Projects

   https://doi.org/10.18260/1-2--35150  

   Kong, Nan; Purzer, Senay; Payne, Lindsey; Kim, Eunhye; Vivas-Valencia, Carolina (June 2020, 2020 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Montréal, Quebec, Canada)

   null (Ed.)

   One of the aims of biomedical engineering is to facilitate the development of innovative technologies to address socioeconomic challenges in healthy living and independent aging. Realizing such innovations requires empathy, agility, and creativity. This project aims to support the professional development of a competent biomedical engineer workforce that can effectively accomplish emphatic innovation, and one that can frame and re-frame problems through the innovation process. Our research examined how engineering students empathize with users and develop empathic abilities that have implications on their design innovation skills. The project team developed empathic innovation workshops and embedded them into existing biomedical engineering capstone courses. Data were collected using surveys, student project reports, ideation tasks, and observations. These workshops resulted in significant changes in students’ emphatic tendencies. From our qualitative studies, we also conjectured that the overall empathic potency of a student design team helped facilitate problem re-framing based on user input. These findings contribute to the literature on the critical role of innovation behaviors in relationship to empathic design tendencies in the context of biomedical engineering, as well as suggest instructional practices designed to promote empathy, agility, and creativity. 

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2. Empathic approaches in engineering capstone design projects: student beliefs and reported behaviour

   https://doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2021.1927989  

   Guanes, Giselle; Wang, Linjue; Delaine, David A.; Dringenberg, Emily (May 2021, European Journal of Engineering Education)

   null (Ed.)

   Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students’ beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers. 

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3. Empathic approaches in engineering capstone design projects: student beliefs and reported behaviour

   https://doi.org/doi.org/10.1080/03043797.2021.1927989  

   Guanes, G.; Wang, L.; Delaine, D.; Dringenberg, E. (January 2021, European journal of engineering education)

   null (Ed.)

   Engineering design decisions have non-trivial implications, and empathic approaches are one way that engineers can understand and translate the perspectives of diverse stakeholders. Prior literature demonstrates that students must develop empathic skills and beliefs that these skills are important to embody empathic approaches in meaningful ways. However, we have limited understanding of the relationship between students’ beliefs about the value of empathy in engineering decision making and how they describe their reported use of empathic approaches. We collected qualitative data through interviews with ten undergraduate engineering students in capstone design. We found that our participants espoused a belief that empathic approaches are valuable in engineering design decisions. However, while students considered diverse perspectives when describing how they made design decisions, their reported behaviour during design decisions did not demonstrate translation of their empathic understanding. Based on these findings, we provide recommendations to educators and researchers. 

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4. Characterizing framing agency in design team discourse

   Svihla, Vanessa; Gomez, Jamie R.; Watkins, Martin A. (January 2019, Proceedings of the ASEE 126th Annual Conference and Exhibition)

   Purpose. To make course-based, undergraduate design projects more manageable, instructors often reduce or remove the open-ended quality, which in turn limits opportunities for students to learn to frame design problems. Here we introduce and characterize the construct, framing agency, which involves taking up opportunities to make consequential decisions about design problems and how to proceed in learning and developing solutions. Methodology. We employed a multi-case study design, selecting cases of student design teams across different sites and levels, all in undergraduate engineering courses. Teams were audio/video recorded during their design process. We adapted a functional linguistics tool [1] to identify markers of agency in students’ design discourse, comparing and contrasting the cases to illuminate the nuances of framing agency. We also identified learning versus task-completion orientations. Results. All students exhibited agency in some form, but not all exhibited framing agency. Analysis suggests that framing agency is commonly shared across participants and tentative in nature early in the design process. Students who exhibited framing agency tended to adopt a learning rather than task-completion orientation. Students who exhibited agency, but not framing agency, made decisions that foregrounded accuracy and efficiency at the expense of exploring tentative ideas, and tended to treat the problem as having a single right answer. Conclusions. We argue that how students negotiate design problem framing depends on whether or not they consider the design problem relevant and authentic, the belief that each member brings different and potentially useful information to the task, and the opportunity to iterate design ideas over time. Framing agency provides a lens for understanding the kinds of design learning experiences students need to direct their own learning and negotiate that learning with peers in design projects. 

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5. Using narratives to evoke empathy and support girls’ engagement in engineering

   Letourneau, S. M.; Bennett, D. (January 2020, Connected science learning)

   null (Ed.)

   Reframing engineering activities to emphasize the needs of others has the potential to strengthen engineering practices like problem scoping, while also providing more inclusive and socially relevant entry points into engineering problems. In this design-based research project, we developed novel strategies for adding narratives to engineering activities to deepen girls’ engagement in engineering practices by evoking empathy for the users of their designs. We describe a set of hands-on engineering activities developed through iterative development and testing with 190 girls (ages 7-14) at the New York Hall of Science. Findings show how elements of narrative (like characters and settings) evoked learners’ empathy, and how learners’ expressions of empathy related to practices like problem scoping and iteration. A set of design principles summarizes critical features of the narrative activities for evoking empathy and supporting the engineering design process. Finally, we offer recommendations for practitioners who would like to use narratives to engage learners in approaching engineering problems from a user-centered perspective. This work has implications for the development of inclusive and engaging engineering activities that appeal to elementary and middle school learners in a wide range of settings. 

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