2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Sociotechnical thinking—the ability to consider technical and non-technical factors together in engineering problem solving—is increasingly recognized as a critical competency for engineers. Engineering solutions routinely involve tradeoffs among technical performance, social impacts, environmental considerations, institutional constraints, and community needs. Despite growing interest in sociotechnical thinking, there remains limited work on methods for eliciting and studying it in collaborative engineering contexts. This paper describes the development and preliminary implementation of collaborative, scenario-based design tasks intended to prompt discussion of sociotechnical dimensions of engineering problems among students and professional engineers.
Using automatic item generation (AIG) in combination with human-in-the-loop refinement, we generated and iteratively refined over 100 candidate sociotechnical design scenarios to a final set of three prompts. The selected prompts were designed to be accessible across engineering disciplines and experience levels while intentionally foregrounding sociotechnical factors that are often under-incorporated in engineering education, such as sociocultural, public health, environmental, and institutional considerations. Each prompt positioned participants as members of a design team tasked with collaboratively developing solutions to an engineering problem with explicit sociotechnical implications.
We present an example scenario-based design task and report preliminary findings from group-based design sessions with engineering students and professionals. Initial analyses indicate that the scenarios elicited rich collaborative discussions in which participants identified a wide range of interacting technical and non-technical factors and reasoned about tradeoffs among them. Differences in how students and professionals engaged with the prompts suggest the potential for these tasks to support research on developmental trajectories of sociotechnical thinking. The scenario-based design tasks described in this paper offer a flexible research instrument and instructional tool for studying and supporting sociotechnical thinking in collaborative engineering settings.