As engineering education confronts the demands of Society 5.0, identifying effective pathways for cultivating instructors who can think, design, and teach through human-centered, interdisciplinary, and technologically fluent perspectives has become an urgent priority. In this context, engineering and other Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics (STEAM) programs increasingly require faculty capable of integrating interdisciplinary reasoning, technological fluency, and human-centered pedagogical orientations; yet professional development for instructors often remains lecture-driven, limiting opportunities for experiential learning and reflective transformation. This study examines how faculty develop technical reasoning, collaborative practices, and empathic awareness when positioned as learners within an immersive, interdisciplinary, maker-centered workshop using Arduino and simulation tools. The week-long professional development experience, conducted at a private Mexican university, involved a physicist and an architect who engaged in daily engineering-design challenges. Data sources included reflective journals, field notes, and technical artifacts such as code iterations, serial logs, and circuit diagrams. A two-cycle thematic analysis revealed five interrelated dimensions of faculty learning: debugging as an epistemic and metacognitive practice; visualization as a boundary object enabling interdisciplinary sense-making; negotiation of design priorities through dialogic collaboration; affective regulation that strengthened empathy with students; and design-to-intent transfer culminating in a competency-based didactic activity. Findings demonstrate that immersive, challenge-based professional development fosters human-centered teaching competencies by transforming technical upskilling into reflective, relational, and purpose-driven learning. This study thus contributes an empirically grounded model for designing professional development experiences aligned with the human-centered imperatives of STEAM education in Society 5.0, a more humane, collaborative, and socially responsive educational future.
