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Date of Graduation
5-2026
Description
During the engineering design process, the ‘black box’ of a designer's mind determines who the stakeholders are, which stakeholder needs they are addressing and how they will address them. This process can build bias into engineering designs, leading to less equitable, accessible, and inclusive engineered artifacts. Design neurocognition, a new field that aims to determine the unknowns of a working designer’s mind, has arisen because of this uncertainty. The fNIRS (Functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy) allows insight into the prefrontal cortex during decision making processes by analyzing the change in oxygenated blood in the surface of the prefrontal cortex, about 3 cm (about 1.18 in) in depth. Triangulating the data received from both brain activity (from the fNIRS), with the traditional methods of design cognition and design thinking exercises results in a more robust emotional evaluation of the problem at hand. This study's objective is to analyze through interviews before and after data collection whether assuming stakeholder perspectives impacts the student perceptions of the importance of stakeholder engagement within the design process. The study is built upon design vignettes, a snapshot of an engineering problem that participants can clearly visualize. In this case, stormwater management in Northwest Arkansas. The participants will be asked to assume three stakeholder perspectives, a resident experiencing flooding, an engineer working toward a solution for stormwater management, and a City Public Works director, in random order and identify all needs and concerns they would have as their given stakeholder. The participants will be interviewed before and after data collection about the perceived effects of stakeholder engagement. The fNIRS data, which will be collected during the entire sequence of events, will be triangulated with the identified needs and interview data to determine whether different patterns of brain activation are associated with different design outcomes. Case studies alone have been shown to engage students more effectively than plain information, but little research has been done on what is happening differently within the student’s brain during such case studies. The results from this work build a stronger argument that stakeholder engagement should be incorporated more heavily into engineering courses, as in the long term, this learned procedure of stakeholder engagement and empathy leads to the lessening of repeated marginalization of certain disregarded groups, creating a better design for each stakeholder involved in the issue.
Publication Date
2025
Document Type
Book
Degree Name
Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering
Degree Level
Undergraduate
Department
Mechanical Engineering
Advisor/Mentor
Campbell, Jenn
Disciplines
Engineering
Keywords
Engineering
Citation
Taylor, M., Ndiaye, Y., & Campbell, J. (2025). Stakeholder Perspective-Taking in Engineering Design; A Neurocognitive Approach. 2025 Research Poster Competition. Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/hnrcsturpc25/33
Comments
Third Place - Engineering Group 1 Category