Students' perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement during engineering design

Abstract

Background: Human-centered design approaches promote and facilitate comprehensive understanding of stakeholders to inform design decisions. Successful engagement with stakeholders is critical to favorable design outcomes and requires skillful information gathering and synthesizing processes, which present unique challenges to student designers. Purpose/Hypothesis: Our study sought to answer the following research question: What factors influence design teams' perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement during design decision-making?. Design/Method: During a capstone design experience, we conducted four semistructured group interviews with seven capstone undergraduate student design teams and collected their design reports. We analyzed the data across teams to identify factors that influenced teams' perceptions of the value of stakeholder engagement. Results: Teams perceived stakeholder specific interactions to be more useful when they prespecified a goal for the interaction, interacted with stakeholders who had specific subject matter expertise, or ceded control of the decision-making process to stakeholders. Students perceived interactions to be less useful when information gathered varied across stakeholders or when information was not directly applicable to the design decision at hand. Conclusions: The factors this study identified that influenced students' perceptions of the usefulness of stakeholder interactions elucidate specific challenges students encounter when engaging with stakeholders. Students could benefit from pedagogical structures that assist them throughout design-related engagement with stakeholders and when applying the information gathered through engagements with stakeholders to design decision-making.