2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

As evident from several products recently analyzed in research and legal hearings, ethical considerations of products’ influence on user behavior, choice, and well-being may be eclipsed in favor of business outcomes. Persuasive design, a unidirectional process through mobile apps and other digital-enabled products, may translate to consumer risk or inadvertent outcomes. In this study, we examine utilization of ethical safeguards and psychological competencies in undergraduate engineering capstone courses, to inform innovative product design with student consideration of ethical influence on users and optimization of consumer wellness. To this end, we propose a research collaboration between engineering technology and psychology to promote undergraduate understanding and incorporation of ethical and psychological competencies that promote a balanced view of consumer persuasion, engagement, outcomes, and wellness. Our proposed curriculum model integrates guidelines for ethical product development with the ultimate goal of giving capstone students a framework for understanding product design as a foundation for consumer choice architecture.

Previous research introduced, through brief educational intervention, capstone students to seven ethical and psychological constructs: privacy, informed consent, unintended outcomes and safeguards, participatory design, choice architecture, user motivation and engagement, and measurement of user outcomes. In the present study, we aim to: 1) refine curricular integration of psychological and broader engineering sciences, 2) replicate the previous study with revised pre-post intervention surveys in a larger and more diverse sample, 3) validate the improved survey instrument used in earlier work, 4) assess whether students applied proposed constructs, and 5) explore which challenges prevented construct application to design. We propose eight psychological and/or ethical constructs (with the addition of survey items relevant to AI/ML) as feasible for incorporation in product design and will test this hypothesis with student survey responses pre and post an educational (presentation) intervention, as well as factor analytic study of survey responses. The study population in scope of this study is the undergraduate seniors enrolled in the capstone design project sequence of two courses ESET 419, and ESET 420 at the Engineering Technology and Industrial Distribution department at Texas A&M University – College Station.