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?

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. Valuing and engaging stakeholders: The effects of engineering students' interactions during capstone design Introduction and BackgroundDesign is a critical component of engineering students' education and an essential skill in engineering. 1,2 Recently, human-centered design processes have been featured in the design practice literature, because the processes result in usable products that are better able to meet the needs and wants of stakeholders.3,4 Human-centered design directs the designer to focus on the stakeholders affected by the design and the broader context in which the product will be used (as opposed to the technology being developed).5 To implement human-centered design processes the designer needs to interact with or to involve stakeholders in the design process itself in order to obtain a deep understanding of the stakeholders and the future product's context of use.

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...

Effective stakeholder interviewing is a critical component of a design process. However, interviewing is a complex skill that is difficult for novice designers to learn and incorporate into their design practices. Few studies have investigated how novice designers apply recommended practices for interviewing stakeholders during the development of product requirements. In this research, we studied how novice designers elicited information to inform the development of product requirements during stakeholder interviews. Results included the establishment of a coding methodology developed from a systematic literature review of recommended interviewing practices that was used to reliably evaluate the use of recommended practices in novice designers’ interviews. A correlation existed between the use of recommended practices and the extent to which information gathered from interviews was incorporated into the requirements. Additionally, specific recommended practices, such as encouraging deep thinking and being flexible and opportunistic, differentiated performance among novice designers. The coding methodology could be adapted to guide the development of stakeholder interview protocols and assessment of design interview skills.