Empowering engineers to develop socially meaningful solutions using empathetic design

This paper presents a potential approach to expose students to empathy when exploring complex societal problems and moving beyond technology-centred design. Combining empathy with system thinking will enable students to explore user experience and recognize the many contributing factors and the competing needs and tradeoffs in a complex system. A lesson plan, for one hour of class activity, is proposed to apply this approach to the COVID-19 pandemic. The objective of the learning activity is to analyze the healthcare system during the COVID-19 pandemic from a system and user perspectives, including its purpose, operation and stakeholders. A causal loop diagram tool will be employed to identify elements of the system and how they are connected. It is hoped that the analysis of the COVID-19 pandemic will enable students to integrate system thinking and empathy to define problems holistically.