Feeling the Heat! Exploring the Relationship Between Students’ Empathy, Attitudes Towards Sustainability, and Their Identification of Problem Requirements

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Prabhu ◽  
Mohammed Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Elizabeth Starkey
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
Primary User ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Trait Empathy ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
Tools And Techniques ◽  
The Relationship

Abstract As global resources deplete, there has emerged a need for designers to emphasize sustainability in engineering design. Towards this end, several researchers have presented design tools to support sustainable design; however, designers must be encouraged to adopt a sustainable design mindset and actively utilize these design tools and techniques in the design process. Prior research has identified the need for interpersonal skills such as empathy among individuals to encourage an active sustainable mindset among them. While several researchers have demonstrated the relationship between designers’ empathy and their identification of problem requirements in engineering design, little research has explored this relationship in the context of sustainable design. This direction of research is particularly important as environment-focused decisions in engineering design do not always benefit the primary user of a solution, but often affect secondary and tertiary stakeholders. Our aim in this paper is to explore this research gap through an experimental study with undergraduate engineering students. Specifically, we compared the relationship between participants’ trait empathy and their attitudes towards sustainability, in the context of environmental sustainability. We then investigated the relationship between their trait empathy, attitudes towards sustainability, and their identification of problem requirements in a design task. From the results, we see that students’ intentions towards sustainable actions positively correlated with their identification of environment-focused requirements. On the other hand, students’ perspective-taking — a component of their trait empathy — positively correlated with their identification of user-focused requirements. These findings provide an important first step towards understanding the relationship between designers’ individual differences and their adoption of sustainability in engineering design.

Can Induced Gratitude Improve Creative Performance on Repurposing Tasks?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Natalie M. Sisson ◽  
Emily Impett ◽  
L.H. Shu
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Full Study ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
First Time

Abstract Urgent societal problems, including climate change, require innovation and can benefit from interdisciplinary solutions. A small body of research has demonstrated the potential of positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, awe) to promote creativity and prosocial behavior, which may help address these problems. This study integrates, for the first time, psychology research on a positive and prosocial emotion (i.e., gratitude) with engineering-design creativity research. In a pre-registered study design, engineering students and working engineers (pilot N = 49; full study N = 329) completed gratitude, positive-emotion control, or neutral-control inductions. Design creativity was assessed through rater scores of responses to an Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and a Wind-Turbine-Blade Repurposing Task (WRT). No significant differences among AUT scores emerged across conditions in either sample. While only the pilot-study manipulation of gratitude was successful, WRT results warrant further studies on the effect of gratitude on engineering-design creativity. The reported work may also inform other strategies to incorporate prosocial emotion to help engineers arrive at more original and effective concepts to tackle environmental sustainability, and in the future, other problems facing society.

Not Good Enough? Exploring Relationships Between Students’ Empathy, Their Attitudes Towards Sustainability, and the Self-Perceived Sustainability of Their Solutions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rohan Prabhu ◽  
Mohammed Alsager Alzayed ◽  
Elizabeth Starkey
Keyword(s):  
Design Education ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
The Self ◽  
Empathy Development ◽  
Concept Evaluation ◽  
Trait Empathy ◽  
Evaluation Stage ◽  
Future Work

Abstract Empathy plays an important role in designers’ ability to relate to problems faced by others. Several researchers have studied empathy development in engineering design education; however, a majority of this work has focused on teaching designers to empathize with primary users. Little attention in empathy development research is given to empathizing with those affected in a secondary and tertiary capacity. Moreover, little research has investigated the role of students’ empathy in influencing their emphasis on sustainability, especially in the concept evaluation stage. Our aim in this paper is to explore this research gap through an experimental study with engineering students. Specifically, we introduced first-year engineering students at a large public university in the northeastern United States to a short workshop on sustainable design. We compared changes in their trait empathy and attitudes towards sustainability from before to after participating in the workshop. We also compared the relationship between students’ trait empathy, attitudes towards sustainability, and the self-perceived sustainability of their solutions in a design task. From our results, we see that students reported an increase in their beliefs and intentions towards sustainability and a decrease in their personal distress from before to after participating in the workshop. Furthermore, students’ trait empathy correlated negatively with the self-perceived sustainability of their solutions. These findings highlight the need for future work studying the role of empathy in encouraging a sustainable design mindset among designers.

Can Gratitude Promote More Creative Engineering Design?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Natalie M. Sisson ◽  
Emily A. Impett ◽  
L. H. Shu
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Positive Emotions ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Small Body ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Full Study ◽  
Societal Problems ◽  
First Time

Abstract Urgent societal problems, including climate change, require innovation, and can benefit from interdisciplinary solutions. A small body of research has demonstrated the potential of positive emotions (e.g., gratitude, awe) to promote creativity and prosocial behavior, which may help address these problems. This study integrates, for the first time, psychology research on a positive and prosocial emotion (i.e., gratitude) with engineering-design creativity research. In a pre-registered study design, engineering students and working engineers (pilot N = 49; full study N = 329) completed gratitude, positive-emotion control, or neutral-control inductions. Design creativity was assessed through rater scores of responses to an Alternate Uses Task (AUT) and a Wind-Turbine-Blade Repurposing Task (WRT). No significant differences among AUT scores emerged across conditions in either sample. While only the pilot-study manipulation of gratitude was successful, WRT results warrant further studies on the effect of gratitude on engineering-design creativity. The reported work may also inform other strategies to incorporate prosocial emotion to help engineers arrive at more original and effective concepts to tackle environmental sustainability, and in the future, other problems facing society.

Internet Design Studio

2004 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zahed Siddique
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Collaborative Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Virtual Space ◽  
Design Studio ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
Virtual Design ◽  
Internet In Education ◽  
Internet Design

In most instances engineering design courses are offered during the senior year of the undergraduate curriculum. These senior level design courses allow the students to apply different engineering concepts to design a product, with the expectation of preparing engineering students for a distributed and global workplace. Another possible alternative is to provide a simulated education environment where students can design products in a distributed and collaborative environment. The use of Internet in education has opened the possibility to explore and adopt new approaches to teach distributed collaborative engineering design and analysis. The Internet Design Studio, presented in this paper, tries to fulfill this need. In the Internet Design Studio each student is provided with a virtual design studio space for each project. The design studio spaces can be imagined as a virtual space containing design tools, applications, software and theoretical materials that facilitates students to design and perform analysis. Conceptually, a student enters the studio space and grabs appropriate tools to perform different design tasks. The design tools in the Internet Design Studio are web-based and support collaborations by allowing multiple users to view, discuss, create and utilize same models of the product to perform analysis. In this paper the framework of the Internet Design Studio is presented. The applicability of the framework is demonstrated through the use of several multi-designer collaborative design tools.

The Influence of Physical Examples on Originality and Fixation in Engineering Design

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher C. Simmons ◽  
Trina C. Kershaw ◽  
Alexander LeGendre ◽  
Sankha Bhowmick
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Significant Relationship ◽  
Mechanical Engineering ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Garbage Collection ◽  
Negative Relationship ◽  
Design Approach ◽  
Engineering Program ◽  
The Relationship

Improving creativity in engineering design continues to be a challenge. The relationship between fixation and creativity within engineering is mixed, as engineers desire to be innovative, yet are usually working from their existing knowledge to redesign existing products. In the current study, we wanted to examine the influence of physical examples on originality and fixation at the freshmen and senior level in a Mechanical Engineering program. We compared concepts for garbage collection systems generated by two groups — one provided with an example product (Example group), and another who did not receive an example product (No Example group). Using metrics established in prior publications, we found that seniors had higher levels of originality than freshmen whether an example product was received or not, reinforcing our previous findings. Fixation scores were higher for the group that did have an example. Receiving an example product was not a predictor of originality on its own, but did interact with curriculum and fixation level. Within the group that received an example product, there was a negative relationship between fixation and originality, particularly for the seniors. Within the group that did not receive an example product, there was no significant relationship between fixation and originality. Further analysis of our results are required to delineate how not receiving an example product influences design approach in freshmen and senior engineering students.

scholarly journals ANALYSIS OF HOW CAPSTONE TEAMS DEFINE ENGINEERING DESIGN FAILURE

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farrah Fayyaz
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Education ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
Concordia University ◽  
Design Students ◽  
Two Phases ◽  
Social Environmental ◽  
Graduating Students ◽  
Capstone Design

There is a growing trend in engineering education to increase the societal awareness among theengineering graduates, so that the engineering solutions proposed by the engineers are more sustainable. To achieve this, one of the efforts in Concordia University is to ask capstone students to discuss and implement (wherever possible) ethical, legal, social, environmental, and entrepreneurial aspects of their capstone design. Students are given two lectures during the capstone year which provides them with prompts to identify and think beyond their personal biases and perceptions of the society. At the end of the term, each capstone team is asked to define engineering failure. The aim for this is for graduating students to have a well thought of idea of the engineering design failure before they enter the workplace. This article explains the two phases (lectures) of the capstone lectures related to the ethical, legal, societal, environmental, and entrepreneurial aspects of an engineering design. Additionally, the article aims to analyze the definitions of engineering failure submitted by the engineering students at the end of the capstone year to identify keywords and terms that the graduating engineering students attribute to success and failure of an engineering design. The objective of the paper is to open the discussion among engineering educators for incorporating ideas in their courses that can improve engineering students’ understanding of a sustainable design and assess the success of these strategies.

Analysis of Engineering Design Journal Sketches and Notations

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley L. Grenier ◽  
Linda C. Schmidt
Keyword(s):  
Engineering Design ◽  
Engineering Students ◽  
Undergraduate Research ◽  
Cognitive Activity ◽  
Individual Characteristics ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
University Of Maryland ◽  
Time Commitment ◽  
Coding Schemes ◽  
Journal Entries

Identifying and transferring secrets of engineering design drive innovation within a successful company. In design courses, engineering students rarely use a lab book, a research notebook, or design journal to document anything! During the summer of 2006, a University of Maryland RISE undergraduate research team piloted a study of 12 students’ design journal entries during a Mechanical Engineering senior Capstone design course. Existing note coding schemes from the engineering education researchers were adapted and tested with the goal of inferring cognitive activity. Journal entries revealed individual characteristics about students as learners including: uneven time commitment to design stages, preference for sketching, documentation clarity and individual buy-in to design tools presented in class. Design journal research is a promising path to understanding how students are learning and practicing design.

scholarly journals A Sustainable Design Repository for Influencing the Eco-Design of New Consumer Products

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenzo Ferrero ◽  
Addison Wisthoff ◽  
Tony Huynh ◽  
Donovan Ross ◽  
Bryony DuPont
Keyword(s):  
Machine Learning ◽  
Environmental Impact ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Impact Analysis ◽  
Sustainable Design ◽  
Consumer Products ◽  
Data Driven ◽  
Design Knowledge ◽  
Design Tools ◽  
The Creation

Engineering designers are constantly seeking ways to be more innovative, decisive, and informed of emerging technologies in the design of consumer products. Design tools, such as functional decomposition, morphology, and Pugh charts help stimulate the design process. However, many early-design-phase design tools require designers to have experiential or empirical design knowledge; many of these approaches are intractable for use by novice designers or designers with little experience designing for certain new objectives. In contrast to these current tools, using repositories to store product design information can provide additional and extensive design knowledge to the global design community. Using repository data—and resultant data-driven design approaches—in the design of new products can be especially impactful for DfX design objectives such as product sustainability, about which many engineering designers have limited knowledge. In this paper, we discuss the creation of a sustainable design repository – a collection of product data that includes environmental impact information. Through the initialization of a 47-product repository case study, we seek to create data-driven design processes that can influence designers to consider environmental sustainability. We found, for example, that in the first year of a product’s life, 29-64% of the environmental impact occurs during the product’s use phase, and that uncertainty in input data (such as component manufacturing location and disposal method) can significantly contribute to environmental impact variation. The creation of this sustainable design repository highlights the need for the consideration of input uncertainties when conducting environmental impact analysis. Additionally, the repository has also been used in tandem with machine learning to understand design decisions that lead to more sustainable products. This sustainable design repository enables subsequent data-driven design research in that it provides a large dataset on which machine learning approaches can operate.

Exploring the Utility of Product Dissection for Early-Phase Idea Generation

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine A. Toh ◽  
Scarlett R. Miller
Keyword(s):  
Qualitative Analysis ◽  
Engineering Design ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Early Phase ◽  
Idea Generation ◽  
Creative Thought ◽  
Design Creativity ◽  
Research Gap ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Early Phases

Product dissection is a tool widely used in industry and academia as a means to understand components of existing products and identify opportunities for design. Dissection activities have the potential to impact design creativity because dissection is performed in the early phases of design, which is arguably the most influential phase of the design process. However, researchers have only just begun to explore the relationship between dissection and creativity, and thus little research to date has identified how variations in dissection activities impact creativity. Therefore, in this paper we respond to this research gap by presenting the results of a controlled experiment developed to understand how the type and number of products dissected and the structure and medium of the dissection task (electronic versus physical) impacts creativity. Our quantitative findings (from ANOVAs) are paired with qualitative analysis (interview results) to provide rationale for our results and insights into their cognitive underpinnings. The results from this study indicate that the structure of the dissection activity, the medium of dissection, and the number of products dissected impacts the variety of the generated concepts while the analogical distance and number of products impacts design novelty. These findings are used to develop recommendations for the alteration of dissection methods for inspiring creative thought in engineering design.

SWAZI ORAL LITERATURE, ECO-CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL APOCALYPSE

2016 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Enongene Mirabeau Sone
Keyword(s):  
Indigenous Knowledge ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Oral Literature ◽  
Resource Base ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Nature And Culture ◽  
Western Concept ◽  
Critical Resource ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Conservation Of Biodiversity

The main objective of this paper is to show how oral literature is engaged by Swazis with regards to environmental sustainability. It demonstrates the relationship between nature and culture as reflected in Swazi oral literature and how indigenous knowledge embedded in this literature can be used to expand the concepts of eco-literature and eco-criticism. The paper argues that the indigenous environmental expertise among the Swazi people, encapsulated in their oral literature, can serve as a critical resource base for the process of developing a healthy environment. Furthermore, the paper contends that eco-criticism, which is essentially a Western concept, can benefit by drawing inspiration from the indigenous knowledge contained in Swazi culture and expressed in their oral literature. The paper concludes by recommending the need to strengthen traditional and customary knowledge and practices by protecting and recognising the values of such systems in the conservation of biodiversity for sustainable development.

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