Practicing Engineers' Use of Prototyping Strategies to Engage Stakeholders During Front-End Design

Abstract

The use of prototypes in engineering design has historically consisted of building, testing, and refining the form and function of concept solutions. However, diverse stakeholders, who impact or are impacted by concept solutions, directly affect design success, including a solution’s form and function. Because prototypes enable communication and collaboration, they can be powerful tools to support stakeholder engagement at the earliest stages of design to inform problem definition and concept exploration. However, studies suggest prototypes have traditionally been prioritized during the mid to late stages of a design process and have not been used to their full potential during the design front end, including to engage stakeholders. Further, specific prototyping strategies that can be leveraged to engage stakeholders during front-end design have not been deeply explored in the literature. Thus, my work used qualitative research methods to identify prototyping strategies design practitioners used when engaging stakeholders during the early phases of design. I performed semi-structured interviews with 22 design practitioners working in multinational and global health companies and used an inductive analysis technique. The 17 prototyping strategies identified elucidated distinct aspects of stakeholder engagement with prototypes during early design, including prototype quantities, resolution, and interactions. The study additionally demonstrated practitioners’ intentionality for prototype use. Practitioners used prototypes as tools to promote meaningful dialogue to gather information for requirements and specifications development, and to aid in early concept exploration. To investigate the transferability of the prototyping strategies from the medical device domain to other design contexts, I compared strategy use in 12 medical device design practitioners in the first study to findings from interviews with seven automotive and seven consumer products design practitioners. The findings from this study showed that all 17 previously identified strategies were used to some extent across the two additional design domains, and at least 12 were used in all three design domains. Further, I described common ways the prototyping strategies were leveraged across design domains as well as how some strategies were adapted based on the project context. Finally, I constructed three in-depth case narratives from the design practitioner interview data to richly describe how the prototyping strategies were used in the practitioners’ specific project contexts. These narratives highlighted how practitioners intentionally used prototypes in practice to answer specific design questions and illustrated how their strategies worked in service of their goals. Then, based on the data, I created a prototyping tool to support training and education on how to use prototypes to engage stakeholders in the early stages of design. The tool has potential to expand engineering designers’ repertoire of strategies for engaging stakeholders through prototyping early in design processes. This collection of studies provides guidance on concrete ways for engineering design practitioners to leverage prototypes earlier within a design process, and to do so with intentionality to better understand design problems grounded in stakeholder needs and priorities. The findings on prototyping strategies across design domains contribute to the growing body of design methodology literature, providing a collection of methods broadly applicable in design practice and education. The narratives place these strategies within the context of actual engineering design projects, providing examples of contextualized design processes critical for design education. By studying practitioners to delineate effective practices and guide interventions in engineering education, this scholarly contribution narrows the gap between research, practice, and education.