Special session: Connecting with community: Empathy, experience, and engineering with elders

A hands-on special session at the Frontiers in Education conference introduces an experiential exercise in empathy. Participants will use prostheses to simulate some of the physical disabilities that often accompany aging, then attempt everyday activities to better understand how engineered artifacts - and engineering design choices - can facilitate or hinder these tasks. The “empathy exercise” introduced here is suitable for inclusion in a wide range of engineering classrooms. It draws student attention to the importance of end user understanding and increases student understanding of the connection between engineering decisions and societal impact at a visceral level.