Evaluating best practices when interviewing stakeholders during design

Abstract

focuses on strategies for design innovations through divergent and convergent thinking as well as through deep needs and community assessments using design ethnography, and translating those strategies to design tools and education. She teaches design and entrepreneurship courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels, focusing on front-end design processes. Grace Louise CravensGrace Cravens is a junior undergraduate student at the University of Michigan studying Industrial & Operations Engineering. She is from St. Joseph, MI, and has worked for Sienko Research Group since 2013. Ms. Linh Huynh c American Society for Engineering Education, 2016 Evaluating best practices when interviewing stakeholders during design IntroductionDesign is a critical component of engineering students' education and an essential skill in engineering 1,2 . Human-centered design processes are increasingly included in engineering education as evidence has demonstrated the success of these approaches in product design 3 . During front-end design phases, particularly problem definition, requirements elicitation, and engineering specification development, human-centered design principles promote extensive stakeholder engagement 4 . Engaging with stakeholders, however, is a complex process of which engineering educators lack experience and techniques to teach, and thus, an opportunity exists for more refined and explicit instruction in both engineering design and non-design courses. Prior research on how students interact with stakeholders during design has revealed a mismatch in student behavior and the approaches documented in the design practice literature [5][6][7] . Additionally, the challenges students face when interacting with stakeholders causes students to interact less with stakeholders over the semester, reducing their exposure to human-centered design methods 6,8 . This body of research indicates the need to better support students in learning how to engage with stakeholders during design including the development of pedagogy, evaluation methods to determine student proficiency and progress, and design tools to support students during design projects.This study sought to address the lack of evaluation methods by developing a qualitative coding system that differentiates students by their level of sophistication when conducting stakeholder interviews during requirements elicitation. Furthermore, this analysis identifies the key areas in which pedagogy or design tools are most critical. BackgroundWithin both industry and academia, human-centered design processes have been emphasized as a method of developing more usable products that better meet the needs and wants of stakeholders 9,10 . Zhang & Dong, through a review of design literature, identified several characteristics of human-centered design: human beings in a central place, people are understood holistically, it involves a multi-disciplinary collaboration, users are involved throughout the process, and products are made to be more useful, usable, and desirable 10 . This...

Work in Progress: Mechanical Engineering Students’ Incorporation of Stakeholder Considerations throughout a Senior Design Course Sequence

“…Examinations of students' awareness of and valuing of stakeholders illustrate a diverse set of student personas, from technology-centered perspectives that have limited awareness of and empathy for stakeholders to an empathic design perspective [14]. Currently, these examinations have predominantly focused on small numbers of individuals using individuals or group semistructured interviews [14], [25], [26], cross-sectional snapshots of a single class using openended questionnaires [27] or an outside-of-class performance task [10], [28]- [31]. A few studies have explored students' assignments, examining them at the end of a course [7] or over the course of a semester [32].…”