2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Systems Engineering lifecycle artifacts are built to support an engineering concept development from cradle to grave. For SE students, that full life cycle planning and design happens in their capstone course. The Systems Engineering Capstone class is usually taught as the last course for any Master of Systems Engineering program. Within the class, students pursue a team project where they apply systems engineering methods to a specific problem. They then create the final deliverable with a systems engineering management plan. While students receive strong technical training within this experience, ethical and justice-oriented skillsets and mindsets are lacking if not non-existent. For example, decolonization strategies – the ability to critically examine systems and power differentials through systems design -are not taught. In systems engineering programs, students are usually not exposed to that kind of literature nor do faculty often recognize its importance to project success in the real world. More study needs to be done to understand this gap.
For this paper, we will present a case study on the relevance and impact of decolonization concepts on multiple systems engineering artifacts. We chose to study a systems engineering capstone class to build on our past work in the decolonizing stakeholder analysis paper presented in ASEE 2024. We expand the research to include all deliverables expected of any systems engineering capstones. The goal was to give systems engineering students’ new tools to self-examine their SE artifact from the decolonial perspective. Most of the students were full-time professionals working in the defense industrial complex and had more than 5 years of experience. In this paper we build on the insights of our stakeholder analysis paper by having all teams include a stakeholder analysis with emphasis on decolonial aspects. We will also build reflection on the generated systems engineering artifacts such as requirements, trade space and architecture, test and evaluation and lifecycle management plans. At the end of the course the students were asked to reflect on the exercise and express its relevance for Systems Engineering and Systems Engineering education. In this paper we present the results of the study and key takeaways for systems engineering educators on easy to implement exercises helping Systems Engineering students articulate human diversity more centrally in our artifacts.