Advancing Engineering Students from Capstone to Career with Service Design Methodology

Practice Paper Recommended citation: Hutchison, A., & Abrahamsson, C. (2025). Advancing Engineering Students from Capstone to Career with Service Design Methodology. In Kangaslampi, R., Langie, G., Järvinen, H.-M., & Nagy, B. (Eds.), SEFI 53rd Annual Conference. European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI), Tampere, Finland. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.17632078. This Conference Paper is brought to you for open access by the 53rd Annual Conference of the European Society for Engineering Education (SEFI) at Tampere University in Tampere, Finland. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-Share Alike 4.0 International License. ADVANCING ENGINEERING STUDENTS FROM CAPSTONE TO CAREER WITH SERVICE DESIGN METHODOLOGY A. B. Hutchison a, 1 , C.K. Abrahamsson b a Cornell University, Engineering Communications Program, Ithaca, USA, 0000-0003-2432-0802 b Agvios, Inc., Mansfield, MA, 0000-0002-7805-8179 Conference Key Areas: Engineering skills, professional skills, and transversal skills; Curriculum development and emerging curriculum models in engineering Keywords: engineering capstone design; service design methodology; sociotechnical; user needs ABSTRACT Capstone design courses, while intended to prepare undergraduate students for professional practice upon graduation, exemplify many difficulties in teaching and learning design. Design methodology is rarely emphasized in capstone design curricula, and most lectures focus students’ attention on project management, professional skills such as teamwork and communication, and design methods. Similarly, capstone design faculty most frequently learn how to teach team dynamics rather than design. Design courses typically incorporate problem-based learning and teach students methods, or know-how, but not methodology, or know-why. In this paper, we explain how service design methodology offers a sociotechnical framework for engineering design by intersecting technical props and processes with the knowledge and experiences of people who use, interact with, and create those props and processes. In particular, we advocate for students to perform interviews with the actual intended users of their designs to understand the user’s needs before they design any solutions. In a biological engineering capstone curriculum, we teach service design methodology to provide students with a why-to approach to engineering design that they can later apply to their unique career paths. We provide a description of the curriculum and a week-by-week course calendar to provisionally demonstrate our curricular approach to teaching the why-to of engineering design. 1 Corresponding Author A.B. Hutchison [email protected] 1 CAPSTONE DESIGN & AUTHORS’ POSITIONALITY Capstone design courses in the engineering curriculum have long been situated as a way to prepare undergraduate students for professional practice upon graduation (Dutson et al., 1997). In order to support students in making the transition from academia to the workplace, how these courses have historically been taught is addressed and, subsequently, a proposed alteration to that teaching approach are the main focus areas of this practice paper. While capstone projects provide fruitful ground for design exploration, both students and faculty experience difficulties: for students, defining open-ended problems as well as executing a project under various real and imposed constraints for students; and for faculty, in delivering instruction, organizing both team and project components, and evaluating the projects. The coauthors of this paper both identify as academics, and one of us is also an industry practitioner, so we attend mostly to how design and professional skills are taught in capstone design courses. The first author’s background intersects technical and engineering communication with writing center theory and practice and she teaches engineering communication courses that are “partnered” with engineering courses and faculty (Hutchison, 2024a, 2024b; Hutchison et al., 2024). The second author, Abrahamsson, has a background in academic chemical research and is currently an entrepreneur in agriculture. He has advised students’ capstone projects in a physical design course that is partnered with the first author’s engineering communication course for the past two years. Through this collaboration, the coauthors have observed some improvements in the students’ learning as well as their designs in the second year compared to the first year. Here we outline a potential contribution to the engineering capstone design courses’ framework. 1.1 The Missing Case of Design Methodology from Capstone Curricula Although engineers and engineering educators may conceptualize engineering design as a solidified, well-established process, the way it is taught suggests that its definition and inclusion in the curriculum is less tangible. Indeed, we agree with Dym et al.’s assertion that “design is hard to learn and harder still to teach” (2005, p. 103). Around the time that “Senior-level capstone design courses [became] increasingly popular among many engineering educators” (p. 17), Dutson et al. (1997) reported that typical lecture topics included the design process and methodology (p. 20). Several years later, Dym et al.’s (2005) extensive review of design in engineering courses showed that problem-based learning (PBL) was the most commonly applied pedagogy for teaching design. PBL integrates both designand problem-oriented projects with multidisciplinary know-how and know-why (Dym et al., p. 109). However, PBL does not necessarily offer a design methodology—that is, a set of methods highlighting both how and why to construct an engineering design. Dym et al. do mention the decision matrix method as well as the related Pugh selection methodology for design decision making (p. 107), but neither of these encompass the engineering design process in its entirety. Rarely is an explicitly named design methodology or design process identified in the literature. In Table 1, we summarize and compare three overall design methodologies from the literature to show their treatment of various dimensions of the design process. For comparison purposes, we amalgamated terms used to describe the design process since these differed across methodologies. The six areas of overlap between the above design processes and methodologies include customers; documenting; prototyping (sometimes referred to as drawing or modeling); researching; specifications; and testing. Pertinent to our pedagogy in the biological engineering curriculum at Cornell University is consideration of customers as well as research (Nassersharif, 2022) and data collection on existing designs (Gutierrez et al., 2017). Table 1. Engineering Design Methodologies’ Dimensions of the Design Process Step Engineering Design Process (Nassersharif, 2022) SE, QFD, TRIZ, EBD (Gutierrez et al., 2017) Top-down (Gander et al., 1994) 1 Researching Customer Customer 2 Defining Problem Specifications Documenting, Requirements 3 Timeline, Specifications Researching Specifications 4 Decision Making Decision Making, Prototyping Prototyping 5 Customer, Proposal Proposal Researching, Testing, Prototyping 6 Customer, Proposal Testing Testing, Prototyping, Documenting 7 Prototyping Cost, Customer — 8 Testing Documenting — 9 Documenting — — Notes: The six overlapping steps in the design methodologies are demonstrated as follows: researching in orange; customer in yellow; specifications in pink; documenting in green; prototyping in blue; and testing in light purple. Most recently, Nassersharif’s (2022) book, Engineering Capstone Design, presents a comprehensive diagram of the engineering design process (EDP) that starts with a problem and ends with delivering the design (p. 7). Nassersharif’s flowchart is visualized in a mostly linear fashion, with a few iterative steps, and combines two other flowcharts–the engineering method and the scientific method–“to include this important element of the real-world engineering design into our problem-solving process” (p. 6). Nassersharif seems to locate design methodology within engineers themselves by explaining, “methodology for engineering problem-solving [is] based on their experience, knowledge, and skills” (p. 6). Gutierrez et al. (2017) reviewed four design methodologies to determine how well they supported a Canadian undergraduate aerospace capstone project; those methodologies included systems engineering (SE), quality function deployment (QFD), theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ), and environment-based design (EBD). Of those four design methodologies, the authors concluded that they all "score poorly to support the capstone project" (Gutierrez et al., 2017, p. 7). While each methodology offered methods for completing tasks that students were assigned in the capstone project, each “focus[ed] mainly in the design requirements documents and project schedule deliverable” (Gutierrez et al., 2017, p. 6). In an electrical engineering design course, Gander et al. (1994) implemented topdown design methodology after receiving this paraphrased input from an industry vice president: “It seems your graduates have very little difficulty in designing at the circuit-board level, but they have great difficulty making the step to system-level design” (Gander et al., p. 30). As a result, Gander et al. adapted top-down methodology from software and hardware design environments where “considerable emphasis is placed on system analysis. A fundamental part of the system analysis is the system decomposition process” (Gander et al., p. 32). The authors note that the change in the curriculum improved student project performance, both according to their grades as well as at design competitions. Nevertheless, the authors interchangeably refer to top-down as a methodology and a method, denoting a potential blurring of these terms that we suggest need to be distinguished in the capstone design curriculum. Within the context of this biological engineering design capstone at Cornell University, the professor gives one lecture on QFD in the ENGRD 2600: Principles of Biological Engineering course. Students briefly apply their learning about QFD in a case study report. However, the professor admitted this wasn’t enough exposure to an engineering design process or methodology. When Hutchison asked capstone students what they had learned about the EDP during a class writing exercise, they shared little beyond a problem-solution structure, except for one student who drew and explicated a design cycle. While the above design methodologies might not fit every engineering discipline or capstone curriculum exactly, the literature indicates that methodology is an overlooked topic in many capstone design courses. Put simply, design courses teach students methods but not methodology. In terms of PBL, methods convey know-how, whereas methodology conveys know-why. Based on these findings, we argue that design methodology or process should be explicitly taught if engineering educators and professionals expect students to transfer the engineering knowledge, skills, and affect (cf. Gutierrez et al.; Nassersharif) learned in their undergraduate courses to the workplace (cf. Dym et al.). We hypothesize that teaching students a solid foundation in design methodology offers the second crucial part of PBL, the knowwhy, which may improve students’ transfer of knowledge from capstone to career. 1.2 Teaching Capstone Design & Deliverables We now trace how capstone design courses are taught in order to determine whether the most common lecture topics and deliverables align with what is expected of students. Like Paretti et al. (2024), we also endorse the argument that understanding how faculty learn to teach capstone design “is central in helping us better recruit and train capstone faculty members who can effectively support students’ transition from undergraduate courses to engineering practice” (p. 442). The research on capstone design is robust thanks to surveys conducted in the U.S. every decade for the past 30 years (Howe, 2010; Howe et al., 2017; Todd et al., 1995). (The most recently published results are from 2015, and the results of the most recent decade’s survey are in the publication pipeline.) By contrast, Paretti et al.’s recent research on engineering capstone pedagogy found that, “even as research has begun to illuminate what capstone faculty members do (or should do), we still know very little about how they learn to do it” (2024, p. 442). Although the surveys had much greater numbers of participants, Paretti et al.’s robust interviews with 42 capstone design faculty offer unique qualitative takeaways about how they learn to teach these courses, an underexplored area of engineering education research. When comparing Howe et al.’s (2017) U.S.-based capstone design survey results to Paretti et al.’s (2024) interview results on the focus areas of faculty learning, we find one major similarity between what faculty teach during lecture and what they report learning how to teach. According to Howe et al., 57% of faculty’s lectures covered teamwork (p. 1398). Similarly, in Paretti et al.’s (2024) interviews, participants most frequently cited learning how to teach team dynamics (>73%). Despite a heavy dedication to teams, these studies point to a potential disconnect between the amount of attention paid during class to design and how often faculty report learning to teach these concepts. Design methodology or the engineering design process (EDP) was not explicitly mentioned as a lecture topic in the 2015 survey, but parts of the EDP were, such as concept generation (62%), concept selection (61%), decision making (58%), functional specs (56%), and prototyping and testing (41%) (Howe et al., p. 1398). When it comes to “the focus areas of capstone faculty members’ learning,” fewer than 25% mentioned design (Paretti et al., 2024, p. 447). Capstone faculty’s lower attention to design could be partially owed to the belief that students already learned “conceptual design methods” from their cornerstone courses (Dym et al., 2005, p. 110). So while the how-to is being taught, the why-to is absent. 2 APPLYING SERVICE DESIGN METHODOLOGY TO CAPSTONE DESIGN To situate our claim about applicable design methodologies for engineering capstone courses, we begin by adopting the following definition of engineering design: “Engineering design is a systematic, intelligent process in which designers generate, evaluate, and specify concepts for devices, systems, or processes whose form and function achieve clients’ objectives or users’ needs while satisfying a specified set of constraints” (Dym et al., 2005, p. 104). Mapping that definition onto the design methodologies identified from the literature above, each addresses specifications, evaluation in the form of “testing,” as well as clients or users (most used the word “customer”). The constraints of engineering design in industry certainly differ from that of capstone courses. Often in U.S. higher education contexts, capstone projects are found in one of two ways: externally through industry or client partners, or internally from students’ proposed ideas as well as faculty research and ideas (Howe et al., 2017, p. 1405). In both circumstances, one central obstacle has remained constant in our experience with teaching and advising students in capstone projects: the process of developing a design to “achieve clients’ objectives or users’ needs.” In accordance with research, we believe the improvement in the students' capstone designs can be attributed to numerous professional factors, such as genuine collaboration, open communication, and organized project management. We have found the most important factor is that the students perform interviews with the actual intended users of their designs to understand the user’s needs before they design any solutions. Some research and design engineers might find it obvious that customer interviews would be needed to understand customer needs; indeed, based on Abrahamsson’s academic experience, interviews are often performed before a solution is designed. In contrast, students have typically chosen designs based upon their interests without verifying problems with actual users. Additionally, students find and define users’ problems using web and literature searches. Both these methods of finding problems are valid as starting points to finding customer needs, but a decent understanding of the users’ needs can only come from a few iterative cycles of customer interviews, design optimization, and user trials. It is challenging to integrate such a process in capstone courses where resources and time are limited. Despite that the engineering design methodologies we identified in the literature include customers at some point during the process, students need a more explicit push to integrate users’ needs not only at the beginning but also throughout the design process. Industry practitioners adopt multiple design methodologies, such as lean startup (Ries, 2011) and service design (Polaine et al., 2013). Abrahamsson most frequently practices lean startup methodology in his own business but has become acquainted with service design methodology by advising nitrogen detection projects in the partnered capstone courses. Both service design and lean startup methodologies prioritize a deep understanding of the customer before making major decisions; favor early, low-cost testing through prototyping and iteration to avoid expensive failures; and rely on continuous learning to improve outcomes. They emphasize breaking silos and involving multiple perspectives in the process. The two methodologies differ in that service design is broader and focuses on the entire customer journey and experience, making it more suitable than lean startup when the focus is on the entire service ecosystem, not just launching a new product. Having demonstrated that design methodology is not the foremost topic taught in engineering capstone design courses, we now attend to how service design methodology can impart a beneficial structure to students in these courses. We would never advocate for eradicating the engineering design process; rather, we have learned by teaching students about service design that this methodology can be mapped onto the EDP that is less linear and top-down but more intersecting areas that suggest more interaction and iteration, such as in Figure 1. Most importantly, service design foregrounds “designing with people and not just for them” (Polaine et al., 2013, p. 41) by incorporating qualitative research. Interviews, participant observations or participation, and tools and probes help to identify service interactions, allowing the researcher to “experience things for themselves that may be hard for someone to describe to them” (Polaine, Løvlie, and Reason 2013, 57). Lastly, service design frames attention around props, processes, and people. As we mentioned in a previous SEFI paper, “Props consist of any physical or digital artifacts needed to execute the service, processes refer to ‘Workflows, procedures, or rules needed to perform the service successfully’ (Gibbons 2017), and people include anyone involved in or affected by the service” (Hutchison et al., 2024). Teaching service design methodology provides students with a why-to approach to engineering design that they can later apply to their unique career paths. Engineers are often prevented from engaging in the full design process in the workplace, largely due to department siloing, leading to an overemphasis on technical Fig. 1. Service Design Framework Intersected with the Engineering Design Process innovation rather than sociological needs. Like Bryant & Wrigley, we agree that “there is an inherent need for a transitional engineer to bridge the gap between design and engineering” (2014, p. 77). By charging bioengineering students to interact firsthand with users, service design allows us to promote a sociotechnical outlook for engineering that is becoming more and more recognized and valued. As Jon A. Leydens elucidates, the highly contextualized nature of engineering calls for sociotechnical communication, meaning that “the technical cannot be wholly separated from the social” (2012, p. 4), and we argue the same is true of engineering design. Because technical props and processes must be accounted for in engineering design, service design framework acknowledges those contexts while simultaneously drawing attention to the knowledge and experiences of people who use, interact with, and create those props and processes. 2.1 Service Design Syllabus and Resources We have attempted to integrate the why-to of engineering design in the bioengineering physical design capstone curriculum in a few ways. For five years, the partnered courses were taught in the same semester where students met for 50 minutes per week in the communication course. The biggest curricular change was prompted when Hudson Tumey, a former capstone design student, joined Hutchison as a curricular redesign project intern and spoke to two bioengineering faculty about the potential of offering the communication course first, acting as a prerequisite for the physical design course. This change from a oneto two-semester structure also laid the foundation to increase the communication course credit hours from one to three so that students met for a total of 150 minutes per week, allowing more instruction time for insights gathering, site visits, and design proposal writing. Rather than beginning the semester with general design topics and jumping into team formation as we had previously done, we spent more time encouraging students to explore design opportunities. The idea behind the new course structure was to slow students down and prevent the tendency to go directly from problem to solution. Because the communication partner course involves co-instruction from library scientists, we dedicated extra time to discuss conducting literature and prior art (patent) searches to better inform design decisions. In addition to secondary research, students were assigned to interview relevant users. These activities built up to an assignment we called History of Design Opportunities, followed by the Service Design Presentation in which students explored a broader design idea without concluding upon or drawing a specific design yet. The following week, the class made its first site visit to a dairy farm thanks to advisor Dr. Jason Oliver to see firsthand a poorly functioning vegetated treatment area for silage leachate. After students gave individual presentations on their initial design ideas, they formed teams according to their interests. Student teams formulated a User Persona based upon insights gathered. A library scientist then gave a lecture on searching for prior art in patents to help students find various technical components of their developing design ideas. The class and instructors then conducted a second site visit at a local flour mill, during which the bioengineering instructor’s presence was pivotal to constructing a second team around the design idea of a vision-sensor to detect clogs in the milling pipes. From there, teams began work on their Interviews Summary and Design Justification assignments, both of which were smaller assignments to scaffold the larger Design Proposal due at the end of the semester. On the last day of class, teams presented their more tailored design solutions to the problems defined by each. Along with the final proposal, teams also wrote a Can-do Letter to identify the work they did throughout the semester and describe the skills and concepts they learned, practiced, and applied. One team (advised by Abrahamsson) summarized their experiences as follows in their Can-do Letter: Our first step in the design process was to define the problem we were solving. This led us to the Ithaca Farmers Market, where we approached and interviewed numerous farmers to gain context for our project. Using what we learned about insight gathering in ENGRC 4590 [the communication course], we implemented interview techniques such as meeting our interviewees at their place of work. In these interviews, we were surprised at how changing the way we communicated our approach and questions would drastically affect how interviewees responded to us. We found that by asking openended questions about our participants’ frustrations and current practices, we best learned where the need in this market exists. The College of Engineering at Cornell University prizes inclusivity and multiple viewpoints when it comes to innovation, and the students noted not only how conducting interviews illuminated “participants’ frustrations and current practices” but also how “the way [they] communicated” affected the kind of information they received. Therefore, directly engaging in sociotechnical communication by talking to farmers enabled students to better connect the technical know-how of their physical design with the social know-why of more adequately responding to users’ needs. Hutchison, Tumey, and other members of this curricular redesign project developed a public Canvas course (see References list for the link) available to any Canvas Commons user with resources for other capstone design instructors, including videos, lecture slides, quizzes, and assignment directions (Hutchison et al., 2025). For those interested in adapting this curriculum, the course structure was as follows: • Week 1: Course Overview (lecture)