Jay, A., & Zhou, B. (2025, June), GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/56664

\bibitem{asee_peer_56664}
  Jay, A., \& Zhou, B. (2025, June), \emph{GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities}
  Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada .
  https://peer.asee.org/56664

Angelina Jay and Brooke Zhou.  "GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities".  2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada , 2025, June.  ASEE Conferences, 2025.  https://peer.asee.org/56664 Internet.  20 Aug, 2025

\bibitem{asee_peer_56664}
  Angelina Jay and Brooke Zhou.
  "GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities".
  \emph{2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada , 2025, June}.
  ASEE Conferences, 2025.
  https://peer.asee.org/56664 Internet.  20 Aug, 2025

@INPROCEEDINGS{asee_peer_56664
author = "Angelina Jay and Brooke Zhou"
title = "GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities"
booktitle = "2025 ASEE Annual Conference \& Exposition "
year = "2025"
month = "June"
address = "Montreal, Quebec, Canada "
publisher = "ASEE Conferences"
note = {https://peer.asee.org/56664}
}

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - One common goal of first year engineering courses is to introduce students to the idea of human-centered design. This takes on numerous and varied formats - from learning about universal design to participating in service-learning opportunities, from year-long projects to small classroom activities. While it is often best for students to engage with real, external clients in engineering design projects, it can be difficult and time consuming to recruit sufficient users for large first year classes, difficult to find diverse user groups, and difficult to find user groups with problems that are right-sized for the first year engineering students’ skill set. These problems are exacerbated when the project or activity is short in duration.

This GIFTs paper presents a card deck created by the authors containing different user identities. The cards are intended for use with introductory engineering design projects or in-class activities. Each card in the deck represents a unique user. The cards display the user's name, race and ethnicity, hometown, occupation, family status, hobbies, a photograph, and one additional piece of information about them (e.g. disability status, living situation). Aspects of the users’ identities were deliberately chosen to present a diverse set of characteristics across the entire deck. Students draw cards randomly and then complete the project or classroom activity with the person on their card as the intended user for their design. 

These cards were utilized for a two-week introductory project in a common first year engineering course at the authors’ institution (a private R1 university). Students were first required to research aspects of their users’ lives they were unfamiliar with and write a short report presenting their findings. Students then design a low-fidelity prototype of a pocket-sized object they believe would be useful to that person. Students present and test these prototypes in class, getting to see a breadth of problems and solutions coming from the same project prompt because of the diversity of users in the card deck. Preliminary student feedback suggests that the students feel this activity helped them gain experience designing for someone who was unlike themselves. While this short design project can be replicated in many other first year engineering classrooms, the card deck was intentionally designed to be quite general such that it can be useful in numerous and varied design activities – even those that only last one class period.

AU  - Angelina Jay
AU  - Brooke Zhou
CY  - Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
DA  - 2025/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - GIFTS: User Identity Cards to Facilitate Human-Centered Design Activities
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/56664
ER  -