Open Research Questions for Incorporating Multi-Stakeholder Interests in Engineering for Global Development

There is potential for multi-stakeholder social impact design approaches to help advance design and modeling processes in engineering for global development. Adding multiple stakeholders, however, raises questions about how to choose stakeholders, weight their preferences, and ultimately model the perceived or actual impacts of products on stakeholders. While methods for handling the interests of multiple stakeholders exist in the literature, they are not without problems that are often exacerbated when modeling social impact in an engineering for global development setting. The purpose of this paper is to articulate some of the barriers and open research questions for handling multiple stakeholder interests during the process of designing engineering for global development products. Six challenges and sixteen research questions are presented.