Empathy and care within engineering: qualitative perspectives from engineering faculty and practicing engineers

In Their Shoes: Student Perspectives on the Connection between Empathy and Engineering

“…One implication of this focus was that we did not provide an explicit definition of empathy to the students. Notably, we felt that this lens was important due to the lack of discourse on empathy in engineering 2 . Empathy is an emergent topic that will mature as its role and presence is explored and articulated in new contexts 29 .…”

“…Some authors even depict this helping response as part of empathy 15 . In the context of engineering, this helping behavior is often portrayed in the form of caring for stakeholders 2,18 or developing userappropriate design solutions 5,8 , but may take other forms, such as in effectively communicating 4 , innovating 19 , or making ethical decisions 20 .…”

“…Empathy can support effective communication and collaboration across disciplines and cultures, promote more useful and responsive solutions for users, and motivate engineers to incorporate humanitarian and ethical considerations into their solutions 1,2 . Despite, these critical functions, studies suggest engineering students are less empathic than non-engineers and may struggle to incorporate empathy into their engineering work.…”

A Principlist Approach for Thinking About the Social Impacts of Engineering

“…Compassion is an affective attribute closely linked to the skill set of empathy and empathic perspective-taking that Hess and others have begun to investigate as a component of ethical reasoning and communicational competency in engineering. 19,20,21 We have argued that perspective-taking is an important component of effective reasoning about ethically and socially responsible design 21 and further suggest that perspective-taking should be considered a component of the communication competency that all engineers should master. In fact, except in the context of international engineering students 22 , the discussion and assessment of communication competency has traditionally focused on skills of oral and written presentations and reports and primarily within the engineering community context.…”

Exploring the Relationship between Empathy and Innovation among Engineering Students

“…16 This drive leads one to implement a variety of practices or techniques, in particular those that are socially oriented (e.g. questioning the social context, gathering insights from users and fellow engineers, observing the impact of design decisions in a societal context).…”