Empathy-led Digital Adoption towards Happy and Sustainable Workforce

This paper addresses why empathy, as a transdisciplinary engineering methodology, is key to understanding people's readiness to adopt a new technology.

The empathy-led methodology collects scenario-based data on users' perceptions of technology's usefulness and the feelings they attach to it in the pre-adoption stage. The paper highlights the pilot study, which applied the transdisciplinary methodology to implement Building Information Modelling in Architecture and Construction firms. The paper highlights the usefulness, applicability, and impact of the empathy-led methodology in identifying individual psychological, emotional, and intrinsic variables that are usually difficult to capture through methods common in engineering and science. The paper concludes with the key emotional variables identified by this methodology paving the way towards a people-led approach to understanding digital adoption for organisations to create a ‘happy and sustainable workforce’.

Funded by InterAct, the project comprises the disciplines of Design, Computer Science, and Mechanical Engineering. Design is the integrator-connector in this collaboration, bringing different disciplinary thinking and practices together.