How Artistic Expression Fosters Compassion in Future Engineers: From Sympathy to Empathy to Compassion

Background: Engineering education has long prioritized technical mastery while marginalizing emotional awareness, ethical reflection, and social responsibility. This technocratic and meritocratic culture often limits engineers’ capacity to address human dimensions of sociotechnical problems. Emerging frameworks such as compassion in engineering propose integrating emotional intelligence, moral imagination, and social concern into professional formation.

Purpose/Hypothesis: This study examines how engineering students express compassion through an interdisciplinary course integrating the arts and engineering. We analyze how students conveyed compassion in written and artistic work and how they linked it to engineering practice.

Design/Method: Using qualitative thematic analysis, we examined artifacts from an eight-week undergraduate course titled Compassionate Engineering.

Results: Students’ ethical awareness was interpreted through a cognitive–affective empathy heuristic. Artistic expression served as medium and method, enabling students to externalize emotion, critique systemic harms, and communicate ethical insights to public audiences. The process reframed design’s Define–Develop phase as a space for ethical imagination and revealed tensions between compassion and competition in engineering culture.

Conclusions: Integrating arts-based pedagogies can foster compassionate engineers who approach design as an ethical, creative, and socially responsive practice. Such integration broadens engineering education beyond technical competence toward care, justice, and human-centered responsibility.