2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This paper reports on the design and initial implementation of a modified Delphi study examining how academic experts across disciplines conceptualize Human-Centered Engineering (HCE). Although HCE has gained visibility in engineering education as a way to foreground human experience, ethical responsibility, and sociotechnical context, the term remains inconsistently defined across disciplinary, institutional, and pedagogical settings. This conceptual ambiguity poses challenges for multidisciplinary engineering education, where shared language is necessary to support curricular integration, assessment, and cumulative research. In multidisciplinary engineering programs and courses, this lack of shared language complicates curricular integration, assessment, and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries.

To address this gap, the study employs a three-round modified Delphi method to surface and refine expert-informed understandings of HCE. This paper focuses specifically on the study design and the preliminary qualitative findings from Round 1, which included 15 completed expert responses at the time of analysis. The first round consisted of an open-ended online survey inviting experts to define HCE in their own words, articulate its guiding principles and values, distinguish it from related frameworks, and reflect on its pedagogical implications. The study adopts several methodological adaptations, including inductive construct emergence, a flexible interdisciplinary expert-inclusion framework, and an analytic stance that treats persistent divergence as theoretically meaningful rather than a methodological failure.

Thematic analysis of Round 1 responses reveals early convergence around HCE encompassing empathetic and iterative design practices, intentional reflexivity on the role and positionality of the engineer, and explicit attention to the sociotechnical, ethical, and contextual dimensions of engineering work. At the same time, expert responses reflect variation in how these elements are emphasized and integrated, highlighting HCE as a multidimensional and context-sensitive construct rather than a singular approach.

By documenting the methodological architecture and deployment of a multidisciplinary Delphi study, the expert recruitment strategy, and early analytic patterns, this paper contributes transparency to early-phase findings and helps develop an expert-informed framework for Human-Centered Engineering. The findings offer initial insights relevant to multidisciplinary engineering education and lay the groundwork for subsequent Delphi rounds focused on statement refinement, stability analysis, and framework development to inform curriculum design, assessment, and future empirical research.