#814: Empathy and Agency in Sociotechnical Engineering Design

Technically-focused undergraduate engineering programs inadequately prepare students for the complexity of designing solutions to sociotechnical problems. By supporting students to frame problems grounded in their everyday experiences set in places they are from, we investigate how they use their agency to make consequential decisions about both problem and solution. Interaction and discourse analysis show how an ideation approach helped students expand design problem spaces empathize with varied stakeholders.