*Research on empathy has been surging in popularity in the engineering design community since empathy is known to help designers develop a deeper understanding of the users’ needs. Because of this, the design community has been invested in devising and assessing empathic design activities.* *However,* *research on empathy has been primarily limited to individuals, meaning we do not know how it impacts team performance,* *particularly in the concept generation and selection stages of the design process.* *Specifically, it is unknown how the empathic composition of teams, average (elevation) and standard deviation (diversity) of team members’ empathy, would impact design outcomes in the* *concept generation and selection stages* *of the design process.* *Therefore, the goal of the current study was* *to investigate the impact of team empathy on concept generation and selection in an engineering design student project.* *This was accomplished through a computational simulation of 13,482 teams of noninteracting brainstorming individuals generated by a statistical bootstrapping technique drawing upon a design repository of 806 ideas generated by first-year engineering students.* *The main findings from the study indicated that the elevation in team empathy positively impacted simulated teams’ unique idea generation and selection while the diversity in team empathy* *positively impacted teams’ generation* *of useful ideas.* *The results from this study can be used to guide team formation in engineering design.*


Can Design Teams Be Empathically Creative?  A Simulation-Based Investigation on the Role of Team Empathy on Concept Generation and Selection

Division / Sponsors: 
Design Engineering Division and Computers & Information In Engineering Division


Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2020/volume/83907

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