2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In order for students to become engineers who habitually seek out opportunities to create extraordinary value, they need to understand the different stakeholders who are impacted by the designs they create. In a typical civil engineering design process, direct stakeholders (e.g. the client) may be involved during the beginning of the process when establishing the criteria of the project, with perhaps some limited community engagement during public outreach. This approach however limits the perspectives contributing to a project. Values Sensitive Design (VSD) is a methodology that asks the engineer to systematically consider values and norms, direct and indirect stakeholders, and the long-lasting impacts early and throughout the design process to craft more equitable solutions and reduce or eliminate unintended consequences. In a senior technical elective course offered in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, students explore the direct and indirect stakeholders involved in a coastal engineering design example. During an in-class session, students learn how to brainstorm the values and norms of stakeholders that they identify, and then integrate those values into design criteria such that it benefits a broader swath of the community. The students then applied the VSD concepts to larger design project that required them to create design criteria that satisfied stakeholder’s needs beyond the original client. The inclusion of this activity in the course curriculum created students who were more invested and aware of the potential impacts of their design.