2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

User-centered design courses are strong examples of hands-on, project-based courses that offer students the opportunity to learn to incorporate stakeholder perspectives and iteratively design products for their needs. It is only fitting that the course structures and curricula of such courses follow the same spirit of stakeholder engagement and iteration. In addition, it is important for engineering students to understand sociotechnical theories of user-centered design, which requires engagement with the humanities and social sciences (Reddy et al. 2023).
In this paper, we will present a case study (Svihla et al. 2023) to describe the process we followed for developing the new course design and the major course components, merging previously-separate courses on the theory and the practice of user-centered design. As part of restructuring our bachelor’s program to reflect changing skillset and student needs, we have piloted a new Cornerstone class called Foundations of [redacted for review], revising our previous user-centered design course offerings. This new 2 quarter sequence combines two introductory user-centered design courses, one on the theory and the other on the practice. It also extends the project component from the one-quarter model to two quarters and integrates technical communication and professional skills into the course project.
We present auto-ethnographic accounts from our own epistemic experiences based on teaching both the previous and the new version of the courses. We discuss rationale for considering the new structure, integrating multiple academic disciplines, setting up the new course structure and preparing the two-quarter course plan, and the experience of teaching it for the first time. We will also discuss the tensions of integrating non-technical disciplines into a design engineering course (Nieusma 2015). We present this as a case study of radically iterating on course design based on student feedback (practicing student-centered design) rather than make small changes to the existing courses, designing a new course to implement such feedback, in the true spirit of user-centered design.

Svihla, V., Godwin, L. C., Raihanian Mashhadi, A., & Brown, J. R. (2023). Broadening Dissemination Genres to Share Hidden Insight via Design Cases in Engineering Education Research. In International Handbook of Engineering Education Research (1st ed., pp. 617–637). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003287483-34

Reddy, E. A., & Kleine, M. S., & Parsons, M., & Nieusma, D. (2023, June), Sociotechnical Integration: What Is It? Why Do We Need It? How Do We Do It? Paper presented at 2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, Baltimore , Maryland. https://peer.asee.org/44239
Nieusma, D. (2015). Conducting the instrumentalists: a framework for engineering liberal education. Engineering Studies, 7(2–3), 159–163. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2015.1085060