Overview

The Empathetic Engineer is a course that will enhance your capacity to harness your technology and problem-solving skills to deliver high impact, innovative solutions that address compelling social and environmental needs. It is a course that puts people, planet and nature at its core, enabling you to generate new levels of value for the markets or communities you serve, without compromising our world today or in the future.

There has never been a more exciting time for engineers to make an impact at scale. We have a perfect storm of need and technological capability.

We have the immense challenge of climate change, alongside a desperate need to create a more sustainable and equitable model of consumption and production. But we are also at the top of a wave of innovation, the likes of which have not been seen for around 120 years, where many distinct areas of technological progress are transforming our capacity to address the immense challenges we face.

The challenges we face are systemic and our responses must be, too.

Week by week, the course will take you through the 6 phases of the process we use, from first scoping a challenge you want to focus upon, researching it, drawing on those insights to generate a clear set of goals and ambitions, igniting your creative capacity to develop novel and exciting concepts, selecting, testing and refining them along with the business model before implementing an innovative solution, that addresses a compelling need. At the end of the course, you should be able to:

Demonstrate theoretical and practical understanding of the different stages of the empathetic engineering approach in the context of engineering design projects.
Analyse the socio-cultural, environmental, and economic factors that need to be considered in the given context.
Apply the principles, methods and tools to an engineering design project to deliver more effective and measurable outcomes.
Optionally, develop a project proposal that spans technological, socio-cultural, environmental and economic systems, including how the proposal creates and captures value for each of the relevant stakeholders.

That is our goal, and we look forward to going on this journey together.

Syllabus

Introduction to the Empathetic Engineering approach, its 6 phases and key principles.
Introduction to the problematics of project scoping, Scoping Statements and the application of these insights on a challenge identified by learners in their own project.
Introduction to the Understand phase and the identification and analysis of key stakeholders and the systems context in which the new solution might operate.
Introduction to the Focus phase and learning how to translate the key insights identified in the previous phase into a mission statement and a design brief.
Introduction to different techniques of ideation, the translation of creative ideas into an end-to-end new customer or user experience and the development of a new product, service or system proposition.
Introduction to prototyping and testing the proposed solution and its translation into a compelling value proposition with a solid business model.
Introduction to the problematics of designing a robust implementation plan which seamlessly aligns with the needs of the stakeholders and of the organisation.