TY - GEN
T1 - Can design teams be empathically creative? a simulation-based investigation on the role of team empathy on concept generation and selection
AU - Alzayed, Mohammad Alsager
AU - Miller, Scarlett R.
AU - Menold, Jessica
AU - Huff, Jacquelyn
AU - McComb, Christopher
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Kuwait University for funding the doctoral fellowship of Mohammad Alsager Alzayed. The authors are also grateful to Dr. Daryl Cameron for his help on the project. We would also like to acknowledge the help of undergraduate research assistants Abby O’Connell and Lois Jung.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME). All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - 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 trait 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 indicate 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.
AB - 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 trait 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 indicate 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.
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85096169608
T3 - Proceedings of the ASME Design Engineering Technical Conference
BT - 32nd International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM)
PB - American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME)
T2 - ASME 2020 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences and Computers and Information in Engineering Conference, IDETC-CIE 2020
Y2 - 17 August 2020 through 19 August 2020
ER -