Design the Future
I was exposed to the role of empathy in problem solving for the very first time at Design the Future, a summer program that teaches high school students how to create products for individuals with disabilities. Against our initial instincts of immediately ideating possible solutions when we are faced with a challenge, the program leads instructed us to first empathize with our intended audience: the people we were building the device for. This consisted of having informal conversations with our subject about their daily lives, observing how they were currently navigating challenging tasks, and trying to replicate and act out those situations for ourselves. This small, yet significant step that can be easily forgotten serves to center the engineer and made us focus on what the subject really needed, not what we thought the subject needed. With this step, I realized we engineers needed to first understand the emotions of our subject in order to figure out how to approach the problem and effectively solve the issue.
Using the design thinking process, which involves empathizing with the subject, defining the problem, ideating possible solutions, prototyping ideas, and testing designs, my group was challenged to create a portable tray for our wheelchair user to more easily carry things around on. With each iteration, our design became more and more simple, as certain features of the tray were removed. By the end of the program, our tray had gone from a very flexible mechanism with interchangeable holders and clip-on parts to a rotatable bar with a suction-cup-held acrylic tray. Before presenting our final prototype to our wheelchair user, I was ashamed that our creation had no originality, as most of the parts were store-bought. I felt like we haven’t achieved anything and that my week in the summer program was a waste of time because our product didn’t bring any new ideas or mechanisms to the engineering world or the world of the physically challenged.
Yet, our subject’s eyes lit up when he saw the tray. As he moved around the room, simultaneously testing and showing off the tray we built, I realized that it didn’t matter whether or not our work brought forth any cutting-edge technologies. The only thing that mattered was our subject and how he felt about our work. If he was happy with our device, then we have done our job. On top of learning about the importance of empathy in engineering, Design the Future taught me that, at its core, engineering itself isn’t about creating innovations, making money, or being acknowledged for your work. It’s about the people we can help and the lives we can brighten.
Work Cited
Balcaitis, Ramunas. “Design Thinking Models. Stanford D.school.” Empathize IT, 17 June 2019, empathizeit.com/design-thinking-models-stanford-d-school/.
