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Short abstract:

This study reveals engineering education downplays emotions, impacting the preparation of engineers for ethical and societal challenges. It explores student perceptions on emotion in design, showing a bias towards economic and end-user considerations over their own emotional experiences.

Long abstract:

Engineering education often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) signals to aspiring engineering students that their emotions are irrelevant and unimportant, thereby sidelining a key component of decision-making essential for producing socially responsible and culturally competent engineers. U.S. engineering education and engineering culture (Downey, 2008) has traditionally emphasized impartiality, objectivity, and a clear delineation between the technical knowledge and the social aspects (i.e., socio-technical dualism) that inform the discipline (Cech, 2013; Leydens and Lucena, 2009; Riley, 2008). This study sought to explore students’ attitudes and dispositions towards emotion in ethical decision making.

Our study was conducted over a semester in an engineering ethics course that uses STS Postures (Tomblin & Mogul, 2018), a framework that integrates analytical and pedagogical strategies such as critical role-play, bodymind exercises, and emotionally experiential place-based activities. Qualitative data, in the form of pre and post surveys, underwent a process of open-coding to reveal patterns and motifs. Although analysis is ongoing, preliminary findings indicate that understandings of emotion are captured by economic logics intertwined with engineering ideologies such as free market consumerism, positivism, and the myth of objectivity, and end-user preferences while overlooking, downplaying, or dismissing the emotional experiences of engineers themselves within the design process.

This paper responds directly to Latour's (1991) charge of "retying the Gordian Knot," aimed at reversing the MindBody Cartesian split, by discussing pedagogical interventions and considerations for practitioners seeking to reattach just one thread of this historically frayed rope.