2024 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

In systems engineering (SE), requirements dictate the manifested system. If requirements are incomplete or inaccurate, the engineered system manifests those flawed requirements. From smart cities to AI decision making, a flawed system can have significant impact on human lives. The stakes are high in systems engineering. “Flawed” requirements can mean many things. They can emerge from human error, incomplete data collection, or a misperception of stakeholder needs and cultural context. Requirements are based on stakeholder and market analysis focused on quantitative data capture and tends to overlook the nuances and context of the underlying stakeholder population. The problematic construct that emerges is the absence of a framework and related education for engineers to consider and design with ethical, equity, and social justice implications in mind. Further, there is still a general lack of diversity of stakeholder parameters in early engineering design classes. Introduction to systems engineering courses lack integration of current thinking on community engagement ethics and that absence can be seen across the systems engineering curriculum, as well. We ask: How do we create learning opportunities/engineering interventions that are technically sound, and also prioritize community voice, cultural appropriateness, and contextual efficacy? In this paper, we review three methods of stakeholder analysis taught in system engineering courses and identify where and how one can integrate community voices through a decolonial lens. We then propose a framework that encourages a more holistic understanding of the stakeholders and the positive and negative impacts on those stakeholders.