Developing Novel Practices of Somatic Learning to Enhance Empathic Perspective-Taking for Ethical Reasoning and Engineering Design

Empathic perspective-taking is central to human-centered, universal, user-centered, and participatory design approaches, as well as ethical reasoning. Designers and users have significant somatic (sensory, proprioceptive, and kinesthetic) knowledge about problems of technology utilization. However, engineering students are not currently taught to access, understand, or value this somatic knowledge in problem-solving processes such as design and ethics. To address this need, we are incorporating a series of developmentally-oriented experiences in enhanced somatosensory awareness adapted from somatics and performing arts into two short courses in the Summer of 2014. Both courses involve assistive technology design projects with community partners of differently-abled clients, but one is located internationally and the other domestically. We will utilize multiple measures of empathic perspective-taking in the context of engineering design and ethical reasoning before and after the courses to assess change. We believe this novel application of practices of somatic learning in the technical field of engineering design and ethical analysis will yield new insights into empathic perspective-taking. This work in progress paper describes our design, application, and testing of these somatosensory awareness practices in both an international and local context. At the conference we will present results from the completed study.