Teaching User-Centered Design for More Sustainable Infrastructure through Role-Play and Experiential Learning

Civil infrastructure systems that fail to achieve intended goals drain financial resources and erode public willingness to invest in future upgrades and new systems. Starting the engineering design process with perspective taking from the point of view of intended users can help offer tailor-made solutions that better meet their needs. Defined here as user-centered design, this process is vital to building more sustainable infrastructure that meets user needs with less waste. In an active learning approach to teach civil engineering students about sustainable infrastructure through user-centered design, students were asked to role-play community members during a mock charrette process and then were asked to interview stakeholders and to write a reflection. The purpose of this approach was to measure the influence of the two active learning methods on students' designs. The results indicate that teaching the charrette process through role-play helped students recognize multiple stakeholders (both direct and indirect). In addition, empathizing with stakeholder groups as part of design thinking shifted student design proposals from just addressing technical issues to considering how their engineering designs addressed user safety, comfort, and well-being.