Gray, C. M., & McKIlligan, S., & Daly, S. R., & Seifert, C. M., & Gonzalez, R. (2015, June), Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’  Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington. 10.18260/p.24208

\bibitem{asee_peer_24208}
  Gray, C. M., \& McKIlligan, S., \& Daly, S. R., \& Seifert, C. M., \& Gonzalez, R. (2015, June), \emph{Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’}
  Paper presented at 2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Seattle, Washington.
  10.18260/p.24208

Colin M. Gray, Seda McKIlligan, Shanna R. Daly, Colleen M. Seifert, and Richard Gonzalez.  "Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’".  2015 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 2015, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2015.  https://strategy.asee.org/24208 Internet.  08 Jun, 2024

\bibitem{asee_peer_24208}
  Colin M. Gray, Seda McKIlligan, Shanna R. Daly, Colleen M. Seifert, and Richard Gonzalez.
  "Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’".
  \emph{2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition, Seattle, Washington, 2015, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2015.
  https://strategy.asee.org/24208 Internet.  08 Jun, 2024

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_24208
author = "Colin M. Gray, Seda McKIlligan, Shanna R. Daly, Colleen M. Seifert, and Richard Gonzalez"
title = "Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’"
booktitle = "2015 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition"
year = "2015"
month = "June"
address = "Seattle, Washington"
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://strategy.asee.org/24208}
number = {10.18260/p.24208}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  -                         Idea Generation Through Empathy:                      Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’Students in engineering are required to evaluate their products against user requirements, butoften, these requirements are abstracted from the user or context of use, making it difficult forstudents to empathize with the eventual user of the product or system they are designing. Inprevious research, we have demonstrated the use of Design Heuristics to encourage divergencein ideation at initial stages of the design process. Design Heuristics—a tool based on award-winning products and design activities of engineers and product designers (e.g., Yilmaz &Siefert, 2011)—has been extensively validated through empirical studies, shown to increaseideation capacity and flexibility. Use of this method has been focused primarily on early stageideation, with less support for students who are iterating on or evaluating more developedconcepts. Our proposal focuses on extending the student’s understanding of the problem spaceby generating empathy with the end user and context. Through this empathetic positioning, theDesign Heuristics method can be used to lead to a richer space for additional idea generation.Typical uses of Design Heuristics in an engineering classroom context (e.g., Daly, et al., 2012)have not been situated in the context of use, thus operating at a level of abstraction above theuser, context, or sociocultural milieu. One of the more significant insights to come out of thedesign community is the importance of problematizing the context and a rich understanding ofthe user and importing that information back into the design process (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1996;Young, 2008). So while ideating with Design Heuristics allows for questioning on thecomponent or feature level, traditional framings of this method have not encouraged theinterrogation of the larger problem framing, or potential use cases and contexts within thatframing.Usability testing methods such as contextual inquiry (Beyer & Holtzblatt, 1996), mental models(Young, 2008), critical incident analysis (Flanagan, 1954), and cognitive walkthroughs (Spencer,2000; Wharton, Reiman, Lewis, & Polson, 1994) have been developed to foreground situated,user-centered perspectives of the design. We analyzed several of these user-centered methodscommon in other disciplines and then adapted the cognitive walkthrough for use in anengineering education context. This method was revised and extended to maximize empathywith the end user and context, in order to use these insights to promote a more situated form ofidea development using the Design Heuristics cards.The cognitive walkthrough is a method to evaluate usability in software engineering (Spencer,2000), and includes: defining inputs, convening the walkthrough and working through definedaction sequences, recording critical information, and iteratively revising the product. For anengineering context, we adapted this method (Figure 1) to encourage targeted idea generation,while relying on less structured action sequences, with the “user story” as the primary form ofwalking through the concept from a user perspective.                                Figure 1. Revised cognitive walkthrough process.In this paper, we present several case studies of students using this method to expand their notionof situated use, demonstrating how it may have utility for importation into engineering contexts.Our early testing has indicated that this method stimulates empathy on the part of the student forthe design context they are working within, resulting in a richer narrative that foregroundsproblems that a user might address, which recursively encourages targeted idea generation.ReferencesBeyer, H., & Holtzblatt, K. (1998). Contextual design: Defining customer-centered systems. San Francisco, CA: MorganKaufmann.Daly, S. R., Christian, J. L., Yilmaz, S., Seifert, C. M., & Gonzalez, R. (2012). Assessing design heuristics for idea generation inan introductory engineering course. International Journal of Engineering Education, 28(2), 463.Flanagan, J. C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.Spencer, R. (2000). The streamlined cognitive walkthrough method, working around social constraints encountered in a softwaredevelopment company. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems (pp. 353-359). NewYork, NY: ACM Press.Yilmaz, S., & Seifert, C. M. (2011). Creativity through design heuristics: A case study of expert product design. Design Studies,32(4), 384-415. doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.01.003Young, I. (2008). Mental models: Aligning design strategy with human behavior. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.Wharton, C., Rieman, J., Lewis, C., & Polson, P. (1994). The cognitive walkthrough method: A practitioner's guide. In Usabilityinspection methods (pp. 105-140). New York, NY: John Wiley and Sons.
AU  - Colin M. Gray
AU  - Seda McKIlligan
AU  - Shanna R. Daly
AU  - Colleen M. Seifert
AU  - Richard Gonzalez
CY  - Seattle, Washington
DA  - 2015/06/14
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Idea Generation Through Empathy: Reimagining the ‘Cognitive Walkthrough’
UR  - https://strategy.asee.org/24208
DO  - 10.18260/p.24208
ER  -