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A Framework for Fostering Compassionate Design Thinking During the Design Process
Abstract
Design educators in mechanical engineering departments have witnessed an evolution in the types of design problems that students prefer to address in their courses. Anecdotal evidence from discussions with colleagues indicate that over the last 30 years, projects have evolved from the design of purely mechanical systems to projects that require knowledge outside of the traditional engineering paradigm, including social sciences. These evolving interests have added complexity to the role of design educators and have revealed the limits of available design tools used in these courses; these tools are often not sufficient to support decision-making when subjective aspects of the design process are involved, such as customer preferences. Though a number of design tools exist to assist engineers with understanding customer preferences, they do not provide the specificity needed for sensitive design contexts and require direct access to the end-user. We define sensitive design contexts as those that are perceived largely as invasive/ personal, resulting in a high degree of emotional engagement by the user, such as patients in medical environments or victims in disaster areas. The variety and complexity of design considerations to be considered are high. In the following, we will focus on "compassionate design thinking", i.e., on the role and impact of compassion during the design process. This paper presents a baseline approach for establishing a framework for compassionate design. The ultimate goal is to provide context-specific guidelines that can be used without having direct access to the end-user.
... It was speculated that participants who focused on more specific lower-level functions in functional analysis fail to recognize functions separately from physical forms or have a lower ability for larger scope thinking [57]. I.e., the ability to represent functions abstractly relates to deeper thinking beyond what is tangible. ...
... The study in Ref. [38] also stated that refraining from mentioning product parts helps create abstract functions. Both of these [38,57] imply the importance of abstractness in functional analysis. It is highly likely that the workflow helped designers examine the design problem at a higher level regarding how to finish a target user's goal instead of possible individual components on a product. ...
Functional analysis aims to decompose the main functions of a product, which can be large and complex, into more manageable subfunctions. Recently, interest in explicitly considering users during functional modeling has grown to enhance analysis completeness, but how this addresses some commonly reported challenges for novice engineers is not clear. This research proposes and assesses a simple way to streamline user considerations in functional analysis as potential mitigation for some challenges (i.e., difficulty in identifying functions to explore design space and expressing the functions with expected syntax and solution neutrality) that novice designers frequently mention at the early design stage. Analysis of the results indicates that embedding requirements into a user workflow supports novice designers generate significantly more functions with correct syntax than starting with requirements only. In addition, the exploration space is prominently broader, especially at the higher levels measured by the geometry of the generated hierarchical models. These results suggest that strategically incorporating user considerations, even in a simple way, positively addresses the common challenges. This initial exploration and assessment could serve as an inspiration for future research on more efficient ways to streamline the functional decomposition process and, in turn, better support subsequent systematic conceptual design.
... Citing Leonard and Rayport [18], Seshadri et al. defined empathic design as "a set of techniques that helps to identify customer-needs," which "has its foundation in observation of the customer in her/ his environment, that is, in the context of use" [21]. The paper introduces detailed empathic design techniques, including observation, data capture, reflection, and brainstorm, yet the paper says nothing about designers' own psychological status or how designers register the user's feelings internally. ...
... Instead, the paper shows an interest in transforming users into data sources. Empathic design is valued for "empower[ing] designers by observation" [21]. ...
... Another example is a mammogram machine, which is large and noisy, with moving parts that can frighten some patients (Peek, Sayad & Markwardt 2008). Such products and systems that impact the user's emotional well-being served as the inspiration for the conception of Compassionate Design (CD) (Seshadri, Reid & Booth 2014). ...
... .indirectly we're changing the gender responsibility from girls to boys. (Seshadri et al. 2014). The coding and analysis here were 'not literal, but [were] arguable low-inference interpretations' (Drisko & Maschi 2015). ...
Human-centered design provides a means to help designers create products or systems with ‘people’ as the focus. Compassionate Design (CD) , introduced in this paper, is an approach that addresses niche sensitive needs and involves a way of thinking where designers pay special attention to the users’ sense of dignity, empowerment, and security. These niche needs surfaced as a result of analyses of 12 cases situated in sensitive contexts where the users felt vulnerable, had a high level of emotional engagement and were negatively affected by the situation. The designers described their deep concern for the users in various talks and interviews. This paper explains the conception of CD and its development that resulted from iteratively and qualitatively analyzing these cases in which designers were intuitively focusing on niche user needs. Dignity, empowerment and security form the basis of CD and have been contextualized in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs after they emerged as a result of the analysis of data. This research sets the platform for a design approach that can help designers to consider the often unarticulated user needs of dignity, empowerment and security, in a more intentional manner and not be left to chance .
... This leads to a cycle of trial-and-error which can cause irreparable mistakes and excessive spending on products. Motivated by the concept of compassionate design by Seshadri et al. [6] , we present research to empirically study the effects of heat on hair through the integration of design methodology , customer needs analysis, and thermal sciences. Section 2 presents background information. ...
... Customer needs have often been assessed through interviews, focus groups, and design ethnography [7, 9] as means of gathering direct information from individuals. Empathic design methods have been used to help engineers identify latent needs of cus- tomers [10] , and compassionate design helps to sensitize engineers to users' needs [6]. More recently, customer needs have been assessed through the analysis of on-line customer reviews [11, 12]. ...
Although the hair care industry is a multi-billion dollar industry , there still remains a dearth in the available technologies and research methods to answer one simple question: What temperature and frequency of use will lead to permanent structural damage (i.e. heat damage) to curly hair? Currently, trained professionals in the hair industry cannot predict when heat damage will occur and often rely on heuristics and intuition in their hair care approaches. In addition, scientists that have conducted studies with heat and hair have often used European hair types, which cannot be generalized to all ethnic groups; they have also conducted experiments that are not ecologically consistent with individuals' use context. As a result, a number of lay scientists have emerged whose use contexts are ecologically valid, but are lacking the experimental and quantitative rigor that engineers can provide. In this work, we discuss an interdisciplinary approach to integrating customer needs, design methodology, and thermal sciences for application to the hair care industry. We discuss the formulation of a predictive model, the design of an experimental test-bed for collecting data, and present initial results .
... Call it human-centred [37] - [41], empathic [42] - [44], compassionate [45], humanitarian [27], [28], or 'socially -just' [46], [47] designingthe value of it remains the same: having the needs of the people at the core of the design and the design process. ...
Studies show that personal values can influence decision making, problem solving, and behaviour. We draw from this literature and analyse the link between personal value and designs produced by civil engineering students, as part of a Human-Centred Designing assignment. We also study the influence of priming on design decisions.
We collected data on Schwartz’s Personal Value Systems of first- and third year civil engineering students at a university in Wales. Students were set a conceptual design task to fulfil a variety of human needs from subsistence to freedom, with the intention of elevating the quality of life of residents by meeting as many needs as possible. We analysed which Higher Order Values were more likely to produce designs with community-orientated spaces that enable residents to interact, fulfilling communal needs, termed ‘Communal Designs’.
While the majority (63.93%) of first year students were in the Higher Order Value Self Transcendence category, which is aligned with communal values, only 27.78% of them produced a Communal Design, with 50% of these having higher-than-average social desirability scores. On the other hand, the majority of Communal Designs (73.33%) were produced by those in the Higher Order Value Openness to Change category, with only 18.18% of these having higher-than-average social desirability scores. These findings lead us to either doubt the accuracy of the claimed Higher Order Value of the majority of civil engineering students, or require us to make sense of the dissonance between proclaimed values held, and the lack of acting upon it to produce Communal Designs.
Priming had no significant effect on whether a student produced a Communal Design, although it seemed to have a significant decreasing influence on Empathic Concern, which is associated with prosocial, altruistic, self-transcendent acts. Our study also shows that the majority (54.84%) of third year students, also had their primary Higher Order Value as Self Transcendence. Comparative analyses were run to search for differences in personal value systems between the first year and third year civil engineering students. It was found that third year students valued Tradition more than first year students. Tradition ultimately contributes toward the Higher Order Value of Conservation, which is opposed to Openness to Change, and thus the likelihood of a student producing a Communal Design.
First year students had a significant correlation between their Basic Value of Tradition and their Higher Order Value of Self Enhancement, and between Tradition and their Higher Order Value of Openness to Change. Third year students were found to have a significant correlation between Tradition and their Higher Order Value of Self Transcendence. This is an interesting finding, given that Self Enhancement and Self Transcendence are opposing in nature, and that there has been discussion of how cultural values could change within engineering education over time.
We also discuss whether Sheeran & Web’s ‘Intention - Behaviour Gap’ could offer an explanation of the dissonance between the Higher Order Value and the decision to act in accordance with it (for example, a Higher Order Value of Self Transcendence, a communal value, was hypothesised to lead to designs promoting community, but this did not occur).
In taking this forward, the principles behind identifying Communal Designs were found to align to ‘Placemaking’, a term used in architectural urban design to cultivate spaces for community engagement. We propose that Placemaking could be integrated into civil engineering’s conceptual design education, as it may provide a framework for civil engineers to consider social impact of design.
... Specifically in educational settings, Seshadri (Seshadri, Reid, & Booth, 2014) found that engineering design projects have evolved and now often require knowledge outside of purely mechanical systems. Studies 1 and 2 have shown that novice designers often do share these prototypes with stakeholders to collect feedback. ...
Prototypes are essential tools that can be used strategically throughout the design process to increase the likelihood that a product achieves stakeholder needs. Prototyping allows physical or visual form to be given to an idea, and research has shown that prototypes have the potential to support communication and improve product requirements elicitation and design input by enabling stakeholders and designers to engage around a “shared space” – the prototype. Despite the numerous benefits of using prototypes throughout a design process, novice designers often limit their use of prototypes to test and verify a chosen concept during the later phases of their processes. Limited studies to date have investigated novice uses of prototypes during the front-end phases of design and the effects of context, stakeholder type, and prototype type on stakeholder feedback. This research leverages approaches from multiple disciplines to characterize 1) novice designers’ uses of prototypes and 2) the effects of various factors on stakeholder design input during engagement with prototypes. We conducted interviews with engineering design students in different contexts to investigate their use of prototypes. We also developed a prototyping best practice framework to evaluate the intentionality in novice designers’ use of prototypes during design. To deepen our understanding of how prototype type can influence stakeholder feedback, we presented various prototypes of a medical device concept to diverse stakeholders, including medical doctors, medical students and nurses and asked questions to elicit feedback on the design. Research findings indicated that novice designers lacked intentionality when using prototypes. Their prototyping behaviors often occurred unintentionally to satisfy course requirements or as a response to failure or setbacks. Novice designers from different contexts favored different prototype types, and all participants underutilized prototypes, particularly during the front-end phases of design and when engaging with stakeholders. Our results further showed that nuances like prototype type, stakeholder group, and question type influenced the quality of stakeholder feedback. Since variation in prototype type, stakeholder group, and question type had a significant effect on the quality of stakeholder feedback, and since most novice designers did not use prototypes intentionally, our findings point to missed opportunities that likely impact several areas: what novice designers learn about using prototypes, the prototyping practices with which they begin professional practice, and ultimately the human-centered design solutions they create. This research leveraged, and has implications for, engineering design, design education, industrial design, design science, and design research methods. We expect that some of our findings, specifically that 1) novice designers lacked intentionality and underutilized prototypes, and 2) the types of prototypes, stakeholders, and questions influenced stakeholder feedback, are transferable to, and can have a broader impact on, other contexts in which prototypes are used. The fact that novice designers lacked intentionality in prototype use suggests that repeated and reflective practice is needed and informs pedagogical and industrial approaches throughout the engineering education and practice spectrum. We recommend that educators encourage a broader, more frequent use of prototypes during engineering design processes. By doing so, novice designers can develop the knowledge structures necessary to use prototypes intentionally, and intentionally with stakeholders, during design.
... Furthermore, it is strongly marked by close interaction with end-users. It has a complete set of tools to support extraction, understanding, and validation of end-user needs (Seshadri, Reid, & Booth, 2014). This is a skill that industry NPD teams often lack (Thoring & Müller, 2011) and that is considered key for attaining NPD success (Khurana & Rosenthal, 1998). ...
The objective of this research is to improve innovation effectiveness during new product development (NPD) processes in industry by using problem‐solving techniques during the conceptual development phase. The concept phase of physical NPDs is widely recognized in the literature as the time when the target market is identified, alternative product concepts are created and evaluated for further development and testing, also called the “fuzzy front end” or “discovery stage”. Design Thinking (DT) and TRIZ were the chosen problem‐solving techniques to support this stage because of their complementariness. While DT is most recognized as an approach that drives project teams toward the end‐users, TRIZ has its main strength during idea generation and selection processes where it has a robust set of analytical tools to drive NPD teams to a final product concept. After conducting a literature review to understand the strengths and limitations of both techniques, a framework is proposed by integrating them into the conceptual development phase of an industrial NPD process. The proposed framework is then tested and validated after being applied successfully in an NPD process in the automotive industry. The automotive industry is a good example of an incremental type of industry when designing its components for new vehicle models, and is therefore a very appropriate laboratory for validating the proposed framework.
There are many ongoing calls for the integration of public welfare concerns into engineering curricula, for example promoting social consciousness, human-centred design, and other socially-related frameworks. However, some engineering students still seem to devalue or resist these initiatives. This paper explores a new methodology to facilitate such integrations, with the intention of bypassing the possible resistance to considering non-technical, socially-orientated aspects, by exploiting a psychology-informed approach of priming. As priming holds the potential of inducing empathy (a prerequisite to human-centred designing practices, and a precondition to consciousness), and bypassing ‘disruptive transitional behaviour’, we test to see if we can prime civil engineers into human-centred designing. Students’ levels of self- and social- awareness and consciousness (which are also factors contributing to engineering professional formation), were recorded before and after their engagement with our version of a Human-Centred Design Task. The effect of priming on these indicators was also captured. No significance in the before versus after results was found, and results showed no significant impact of the priming on the Self-Awareness Indicators. However, there were unexpected results of students’ levels of Social-Awareness Indicators. Students’ levels of Social Consciousness were shown to have significantly decreased (rather than increased) due to the priming. The results led to further expanding the literature review to seek a possible explanation. We discuss possible reasons behind these results, linking their decrease due to the priming, to the self-enhancing, agentic personal engineering values. These values appear to have a contribution towards decision making (and thus, problem solving), and an influence on the students’/ designers’ engagement with empathy (which is a prerequisite to human-centred designing). This sheds light on the need to expand the research on the topic of engineering personal values, and their possible influence on human-centred design, and other socially-related design processes and factors.
This research investigated the effect of warm-up activities on cognitive states during concept generation. Psychophysiolog-ical tools including electroencephalography (EEG) and galvanic skin response (GSR) were used along with self-report measures (NASA TLX). Participants were divided into 3 test conditions: 1) no warm-up activity; 2) simple warm-up activities; 3) sketch-inhibition reducing activities. All participants did the same short design task. Results show that those who did a warm-up prior to ideation had a decrease in stress, especially for those who were not personally familiar with the design problem. The art activities especially improved engagement for younger participants. We also saw that females who used the art-based activities reported lower mental workload during ideation and greater pride in their sketches. However, the warm-ups did not produce any difference in the number of ideas or other metrics of performance. These preliminary results indicate that warm-up activities , especially the art-based ones, help reduce inhibition by calming the cognitive state.
Project and service-based learning approaches have proven effective in preparing new generations of engineers to tackle emerging local and global challenges. However, such approaches are mostly limited by the boundaries of the classroom and the academic term. This article describes a case study of a unique and inexpensive project- and service-based learning approaches that were carried out first within the confines of a classroom and later transitioned to the real world as a practical product through a co-curricular activity. An evaluation of the educational outcomes of the course of study found an overall positive impact on student learning. The course itself resulted in the establishment of a Global Health Medical Devices Compendium, a new open-source information-sharing platform that presents available medical devices designed for, or implemented in, the developing world.
The abstract for this document is available on CSA Illumina.To view the Abstract, click the Abstract button above the document title.
The purpose of this study was to investigate how empathy and care look within an engineering context from the perspective of (1) existing literature (2) engineering faculty and (3) practicing engineers. The project employed three separate, but interrelated studies, including a summative content analysis of the existing literature, a consensual qualitative research analysis of small group interviews with the engineering faculty, and a consensual qualitative research analysis of written responses from practicing engineers to an open-ended question about empathy and care. Thematic analyses of all three studies demonstrated that although empathy and care appear to have a place within engineering and engineering education-particularly given the current trends in engineering towards sustainability, team-oriented design work, and the renaissance engineer of tomorrow-it appears that conversations and awareness of these two constructs may not often be explicitly stated within the literature or frequently addressed by academic and professional engineers. Results from this study help define the role, benefits, and challenges of framing empathy and care within the engineering field. Our analysis and interpretation regarding how these findings parallel and depart from the existing conceptualizations of empathy and care is specified, and implications for engineers and the practice of engineering in general are discussed.
This article describes critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process involving participatory design work aimed at transforming a local context while producing an instructional design that can be used in multiple contexts. Here, we reflect on the opportunities and challenges that emerged as we built local critiques then reified them into a designed artifact that has been implemented in classrooms all over the world.
This study unit as part of the Continuing Professional Development (CPD) programme aimed at reviving the spiritual dimension in nursing care. This paper discusses the perceived impact of the study unit Spiritual Coping in Illness and Care on qualified nurses. The paucity of literature demonstrates some benefits perceived by the learners namely, clarification of the concepts of spirituality and spiritual care, self-awareness of personal spirituality and their current clinical practice which neglects the spiritual dimension. The ASSET model [Narayanasamy, A., 1999. ASSET: a model for actioning spirituality and spiritual care education and training in nursing. Nurse Education Today 19, 274-285] guided the teaching of this study unit. The nature of this study unit demanded an exploratory method of teaching to encourage the nurses to be active participants. Qualitative data were collected by a self-administered questionnaire from the three cohort groups of qualified nurses who undertook this study unit in 2003-2004 (A: n=33), 2004-2005 (B: n=35) and 2006-2007 (C: n=35). Learners found the study unit as a resource for updating their knowledge on spirituality in care and increased self-awareness of their own spirituality and nursing care. They acknowledged their role as change agents in order to implement holistic care in collaboration with the multidisciplinary team. Recommendations were proposed to integrate the spiritual dimension in education and patient care.
Focus groups are widely used within human factors, social sciences and market research. Whilst user-research methods may be familiar to other disciplines, conventional design training has not, until recently, incorporated such activities. With the increased awareness for the necessity to elicit user needs beyond the functional, design research is becoming more established. However, there is a significant gap in training material for design research. This paper will review the scope of application of focus group techniques, with particular emphasis on the suitability of focus groups for use by industrial/product designers, based on the current literature and designer feedback from two case studies.