EAGER: Engaging Stakeholders with Prototypes: Practitioner Approaches during Front-end Design

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This EArly-concept Grant for Exploratory Research (EAGER) grant supports fundamental research into the use of prototypes during the earliest stages of engineering design projects. This is a critical juncture in most projects. Engineering designers formulate a design problem based on their understanding of user needs and wants. Misunderstandings at this stage can imperil the success of a project. Prototypes can be key to understanding what people need and want in a product, and thus determining the ultimate success of the design. However, current reports of prototype usage suggest that they are not leveraged to their full potential when designers are interacting with potential users of the design. The goals of this research are to capture best practice strategies used by industry practitioners based on their descriptions of engineering design projects as well as observations of them in action as they use prototypes to engage with users. The study will focus primarily on medical device design problems due to their richness as an engineering design problem and their importance to society. Fundamental strategies identified in this study will be transferrable, impacting the ways practitioners in many engineering areas approach stakeholder engagement. This will promote greater productivity and innovation in engineering product design and, ultimately, better products for end users. This research investigates design practitioner behaviors and strategies for using prototypes during the front-end phases of design, especially for engaging stakeholders for the purposes of defining design problems and eliciting product requirements. Research methods include a combination of design project-centered semi-structured interviews (both retrospective and near real time), document review, and observations. Data analysis draws takes an iterative approach, allowing patterns and themes to emerge. A combination of inductive and deductive analyses will ensure the results are robust and appropriately contextualized. Outcomes of this research include a framework for using prototypes to engage with stakeholders during early design phases and a series of case studies documenting how prototypes have been successfully leveraged.