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Empathy, defined as the ability to understand and internalize the emotions and perspectives of others, constitutes a fundamental aspect of human behavior. It is of particular significance for engineers and designers, especially when investigating users' needs. There is an increasing research agenda on empathy within engineering and design education, with methodologies such as personas, perspective-taking strategies being implemented to aid students in reflecting and emulating customer needs. Traditional techniques to enhance empathy involve prompting designers to: interact directly with the user, collect data about the user, and rely on the designer's own experiential knowledge. With advancements in technology, artificial intelligence (AI) is viewed as a potential tool to augment this process. This is especially pertinent in the African context, which has a strong cultural tradition, and where a digital gap is often noticed, and educational curricula do not necessarily integrate such innovative tools leveraging empathic considerations. This paper presents an analysis of outcomes from students' ideation in mechanical design within the Senegalese context (West Africa).
A controlled trial is conducted involving 18 students divided into 3 teams, all investigating a design challenge. Three distinct strategies or roles were established: (a) a role-playing strategy supported by two customized AI chatbots. This role is juxtaposed with two conventional techniques to enhance empathy, namely, (b) direct interaction, and (c) reliance on the designer's personal experiences. Students in (b) and (c) transitioned roles to assume the AI role following their hand drawing ideation, while students in (a) were deprived of AI. This is to provide learners with the opportunity to engage equally with AI. Students were asked to follow a four-phases process of empathizing. Following this process, the ideation and solution modelling, they were invited to discuss their results and reflect on the task during a team meeting.
We found that the empathy experience was particularly relevant according to students. Those in direct contact with the users achieved the most advanced solution which met, at best, the design requirements. Integrating AI to support the empathy process was seen as an “absolute performance” and fostered student motivation, teamwork, and leadership skills, as well as an appetence to pursue further similar projects. However, the ability to integrate novel designs into the solution model was a challenge for students who lastly suggested combining empathy strategies to boost creativity.
