2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Human-centered design (HCD) or design thinking 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 institutions are seeking ways to integrate insights from HCD into their engineering programs. This integration should be done in a way that supports and complements existing learning objectives as well as the varied goals 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 the department level. Our framework helps identify connections between human-centered design processes/mindsets and literature-based engineering design activities. Because it also builds on our previous work, which identified four necessary collaborative problem-solving processes to support group-level work, our HCED framework can also be implemented to support collaboration. We intend for educators to use this framework to understand engineering students’ journeys and build learning trajectories that use HCD to facilitate the learning of engineering knowledge, skills, and abilities. In this paper, we introduce the framework and its utility and explain how it can be used to help instructors identify opportunities to create HCED learning experiences, make classroom-level connections to ABET outcomes, develop assessment tools, and create organizational changes.