Using Simulation Experiences, Real Customers, and Outcome Driven Innovation to Foster Empathy and an Entrepreneurial Mindset in a Sophomore Engineering Design Studio

Abstract

is the Director of the Studio for Entrepreneurial Engineering Design at Lawrence Technological University where she teaches courses on fundamentals of engineering design projects and entrepreneurial engineering design. In addition to her PhD in Chemical Engineering, she also has an MA in Educational Studies and is a certified teacher in Michigan. She has industrial experience in pharmaceutical product and process development and over 15 years of teaching experience at the secondary and post-secondary levels. Mrs. Heidi Lynn Morano, Lawrence Technological University AbstractFor many years, Lawrence Technological University has been engaged in a campus wide effort to instill an entrepreneurial mindset in our engineering undergraduates. As part of this effort, we have intentionally created opportunities at all levels of our curriculum for students to practice an enterprising attitude. At the sophomore level these opportunities take the form of a team based, multidisciplinary, engineering design experience in our EGE 2123: Entrepreneurial Engineering Design Studio course. In the design studio, students build on the foundation of entrepreneurial mindset development laid in our first-year introductory design course. As such, at the sophomore level, they spend a semester identifying opportunities for design within a theme, engaging real customers beyond the walls of the classroom, and creating a working prototype that creates value for these customers.The purpose of this paper is to describe some of the pedagogy used to foster an entrepreneurial mindset in this sophomore design studio course. Specifically, we will focus on aspects of the course in which students are identifying opportunities for design, interacting with customers, and determining how to create the most value based on the jobs these customers are trying to perform. Building off of lessons learned from the initial offering of this course, we have created a program that allows students to interact with actual customers through a partnership with a non-profit organization that helps people with disabilities in the workplace. We also foster empathetic design by having students engage in an accessibility simulation we developed to help our students understand the everyday experiences of people with disabilities and placing those experiences in an historical context. We also use the principles of outcome driven innovation to help our students gather focused customer feedback and identify where they can create the most value for their customers in the workplace. Assessment of the impact of these studio course activities on empathy and the development of an entrepreneurial mindset will be discussed based on the experiences of multiple sections of course participants.

Development of Empathy in a Rehabilitation Engineering Course

“…At another large state university, four different modules to promote empathy in a second-year mechanical engineering design sequence were developed [4]. In another second-year course at Lawrence Technological University in Detroit, Bell-Huff and Morano [5] report on a study that is perhaps most closely related to the work presented here. They had students work with a non-profit organization that helps people with disabilities in the workplace.…”

Cultivating Inclusivity: A Systematic Literature Review on Developing Empathy for Students in STEM Fields

“…Stakeholders are described as "all the people who have an interest or are affected by a project" [80, p. 7], and may include patients, doctors, experts, regulatory bodies, manufacturers, potential users, etc. Engaging with stakeholders has been demonstrated to help students to gain insight into alternatives perspectives, and to establish effective solutions to meet the stakeholders' needs [10,24,28,50,57,66,81,82]. In the context of design, it can be critical to not only apply domain-specific understanding, but also to utilize situationally-relevant strategies.…”

What Story Do You Want to Tell? Developing Empathy in Engineering Students through an Extra-Curricular Narrative Sharing Experience

“…In engineering training and practice, empathy is most often taught as related to design methodologies [15][16][17][18][19]. The process of design thinking begins with empathizing with the user and understanding their experience in order to create solutions that meet real needs.…”