Merging Human-Centered Design with Engineering Design: Synthesizing a Human-Centered Engineering Design Framework

Abstract

Human-centered design (HCD) has been an important player in the future direction of engineering education. HCD offers a promising approach to promote situated learning in engineering design projects, and to facilitate students' learning of modern engineering skills. Many higher education institutions are seeking ways to integrate HCD into their engineering programs. This integration should be done in a way that supports and complements existing learning objectives of established programs. However, doing so is challenging given that each engineering course has its own unique opportunity areas and needs. Thus, there is a significant need to develop tools and methods which support this endeavor. We have developed an evidence-based human-centered engineering design (HCED) framework to facilitate program development at course and departmental levels. Our framework helps identify connections between human-centered design processes and mindsets and literature-based engineering design activities. It also supports collaboration by building on our previous work, which identified four necessary collaborative problem-solving processes to support group-level work. We intend for educators to use this framework to understand engineering students' journeys and build learning trajectories for engineering students to build human-centered engineering design knowledge, skills, and abilities. In this paper, we introduce the framework and its utility and explain how it can be used as a tool to help instructors identify opportunities to create HCED learning experiences, make classroom-level connections to ABET outcomes, develop assessment tools, and create organizational changes.