Human-Centeredness in Undergraduate Engineering Students' Representations of Engineering Design

This paper explores design as a process, human-centered design, and students' design process representations. In our work, our goal is for students to learn engineering design skills and methodologies that enable them to practice design processes that are human-centered. Weinvestigatehow students conceptualize and articulate their design processes through different reflective activities where a pedagogical goal is that they also become reflective practitioners. In this paper, we describe two different approaches to design courses focused on human-centered design and a reflective activity allows us to understand (to some degree) students' design processes and the extent to which their design processes are human-centered. This study focuses on the experiences of two groups of students: (1) students who learn design by participating in community-engaged design projects and (2) students who learn design through a classroom-based project (i.e., without a community partner). We build on prior research to compare the two groups of students' understanding of human-centered design and their design processes.