[from http://www.resilientbydesign.com/2014/01/04/empathy-map-square-one/]

Are Women Too Empathetic to be Engineers?, asked Vicky May, Thayer School of Engineering, Dartmouth College, in an article.

Reflecting on David Kelley, one of IDEO’s founders, advice to Darmouth 2014 engineers to “empathize“, May argues that while engineering is indeed about, it should also be about empathy.

“Why is empathy essential in engineering? Engineers design and build products, yes, but these products are for people! To design effective products and processes engineers must understand the people who will use them. And increasingly they must understand people from different cultures. Too often I see engineers develop technical solutions to problems in third world countries that go unused or are unwanted because the engineers failed to understand their users.”

Hence, engineering schools should teach engineering students to be more empathic. Not only, it will increase the chance of having better products and more impact on people’s lives, but also it will help attract more women – who tend to be more empathic – in engineering.

May mentioned a few schools like Stanford and Darmouth which offer human-centered courses and calls for more of such courses in engineering schools. The good news is  students at NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering also have such opportunities: not only through a course, Design Thinking for Creative Problem Solving (design thinking is another term for human-centered design), but also through the  Design Tinkering Club, which “aims to bring the design thinking process to NYU students from all backgrounds and majors to work in interdisciplinary teams,  develop creative solutions, and find new perspectives to create social innovation.”

Check also the Greenhouse program in the Fall as at the core of our programming is core values of human-centered design such as empathy. In fact, this is because a group of students decided to empathize with all Polytechnic students and engage them in the process that the Greenhouse was born.

Enjoy the summer and don’t forget to empathize! :-)

See you in the Fall!

The Greenhouse team