Feeling The Distance: Exploring Novice Student Designers' Perceptions of the Psychological Distance and Empathic Response Towards Variations of a Sustainable Design Problem

Abstract Prior research suggests novice designers find it challenging to integrate social context into the engineering design process. This challenge could be particularly pronounced in sustainable design tasks because the effects of climate change are perceived to be psychologically distant, and this distance inhibits active engagement in sustainable behavior. However, most of this work assesses psychological distance as an aggregate of its various subcomponents (e.g., temporal, social, spatial, and hypothetical). Limited research has explored how these individual components vary based on the socio-spatial context of the design problem. Additionally, empathy development could be an effective mechanism to bridge psychological distance. However, little is known about the impact of empathy-focused problem formulation on students' perceptions of these problems. To explore these gaps, we studied students' perceptions of problem formulations in a 2 × 2 factorial between-subjects experiment. The problem formulations varied in (1) their socio-spatial context (i.e., positioned in the United States versus India) and (2) their empathy focus (i.e., with and without a persona). We measured the students' perceptions of the problem formulations using two metrics: (1) perceived psychological distance (i.e., socio-spatial, temporal, and hypothetical) and (2) perceived empathic response. We find that participants reported the problem contextualized in India to be a more immediate threat compared to the same problem set in the United States. Moreover, we find no significant differences in the other components of psychological distance or empathic response between the problem variants. This novel finding suggests that the studied sample perceives certain environmental issues as currently affecting people in other parts of the world, and not themselves, but only from a temporal lens. These findings call for educators to carefully consider temporal framing when using socio-spatially far sustainable design problems as a lack of consideration could create faulty perceptions of environmental issues.