Stakeholder Engagement

Stakeholder Engagement is a core skill that helps engineers and designers identify and analyze the people, groups, and organizations who are affected by or can influence a project. In this session, students learn strategies for identifying stakeholders and examining how relationships, perspectives, and decision-making power shape needs, priorities, and project outcomes. Engineering and design are fundamentally about how people interact with solutions in real-world contexts, and those solutions can fall short when stakeholder perspectives are not fully considered. Moving beyond a single stage of the design process, this resource emphasizes stakeholder engagement as an essential engineering practice, one that supports better problem definition, more contextually grounded decision-making, and solutions that align with real-world use. By centering people and context, students are encouraged to consider how social, cultural, political, economic, and environmental factors, and potentially competing stakeholder interests, inform responsible and effective engineering work.

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Key Questions

• What is a stakeholder, and how does one identify the involved stakeholders in an engineering design project?
• How can considering stakeholder needs and the impact of the project outcomes on stakeholders affect the design process for engineering students?
• How can visually mapping stakeholders help students to understand conflicting stakeholder needs and compare tradeoffs between stakeholder groups?

Core Learning Activities

• Discuss one real-world example where designers failed to take stakeholder context into account.
• Identify stakeholders using guided individual and group brainstorming, color-coordinated grouping, and categorical sorting.
• Analyze the relationship between groups of stakeholders via two visual mapping techniques: the onion diagram and the power/interest map.

What You Get

Facilitated Learning Package

For instructors teaching the material in an 80 minute session.

• Instructor Orientation Guide
• Lesson Plan for 80-minute class session
• Slide Deck with Facilitation Script, Annotations, and Supplemental Bibliography
• Student handouts
• Assessment Prompts
• References

Independent Learning Package

For learners to complete asynchronously.

• Instructor Orientation Guide
• Independent Learning Document with embedded activities and questions
• Assessment Prompts
• References

Where Might You Use This Resource?

• First year programs in engineering
• First year foundational design courses
• Capstone design courses