Empathetic Engineer

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.

• 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, you can apply the learning from the course to a project of your own choosing, and 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.