Sustainable Design with Stakeholders in Mind

In a world of encouraging students to think like scientists and engineers through hands-on, exciting design challenges, at times we lose sight of human-centered design. Middle schoolers need tools to build their communication and empathy skills, especially after the isolation associated with a global pandemic. My summer fellowship experience--identifying stakeholders’ drivers and barriers for the shift from internal combustion engine vehicles to electric vehicles in Sonoma County--reminds me of the importance of using insights and feedback from the people affected by a system or design, throughout the entire iterative design process. The goal of this learning segment is to have students participate in the “empathize” phase of design thinking--how to identify and understand the needs of stakeholders at the beginning of the design process, and how to use systems design thinking to prioritize these needs throughout the process. These lessons will bolster an existing engineering for human impact project called “Better Build” where students are tasked with picking a space on campus that has a problematic human impact on natural systems and working through a series of iterative checkpoints in order to improve the space’s sustainability. However, the lessons could be modified to be used as the start to any design thinking project, as they teach students how to use real-world tools such as mind maps, empathy maps and personas to better understand the users of their design.