Using Practitioner Strategies to Support Engineering Students' Intentional Use of Prototypes for Stakeholder Engagement During Front-End Design

Engaging stakeholders early and throughout design processes is necessary for product success as it supports the alignment of design decisions with user and stakeholder needs and preferences. Leveraging prototypes to engage stakeholders can help designers develop common ground with stakeholders, especially during "front end"design activities, such as problem scoping and product requirements development. While design practitioners intentionally use prototypes to engage stakeholders in a variety of ways including during the earliest stages of design, research suggests that novice designers are not as intentional or comprehensive in their approaches. Therefore, we developed in-depth narratives constructed from practitioners' real design experiences to demonstrate to novice designers how design practitioners use prototypes for stakeholder engagement during the design front-end. Further, we described strategies that could be incorporated into engineering classrooms and suggested ways to support more intentional uses of prototyping strategies by students to engage stakeholders during the design front-end, including through the use of a novel prototyping planning tool.