Abstract
Design education increasingly recognizes responsible stakeholder engagement yet lacks clarity on what to teach and how. Applying stakeholder theory, we define Responsible Stakeholder Engagement Competences (RSEC) and its dimensions (Balancing Perspectives, Negotiating Power Relations, and Managing Resources Responsibly), and map how programs teach them. A global survey of design programs (N = 167) measured teaching focus toward four stakeholder groups (users/clients, inter- and intraorganizational, social/cultural, planet) and modeled associations with RSEC using Structural Equation Modeling while controlling for institutional/program factors. We find programs emphasizing inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders report higher RSEC, with strongest gains in Managing Resources Responsibly and Negotiating Power Relations; attention to social/cultural stakeholders shows benefits for Balancing Perspectives. User/client and planetary focus were not significant predictors of RSEC. Program types display distinct stakeholder teaching profiles, and some institutional factors (e.g., degree level) matter. We argue for deliberate, program-level prioritization of organizational stakeholder engagement to build RSEC across design fields.
Keywords
Introduction
Many higher-education design programs increasingly acknowledge that design professionals face complex ethical and societal responsibilities, particularly in fields addressing organizational, social, and sustainability challenges (Meyer and Norman, 2020; Norman, 2023). However, responsibility is interpreted differently across design traditions such as participatory design, value sensitive design, and sustainability-oriented design, which creates ambiguity about which stakeholders matter and what competences should be taught. This variability motivates the need for a coherent theoretical lens to clarify responsibility and stakeholder engagement in design education. Design practice demands engagement with a diverse array of stakeholders including marginalized communities, cultural groups, organizational partners and suppliers, and even future generations, highlighting the importance of responsible stakeholder engagement (Felton et al., 2012). Design practice today often entails systemic change, where social impacts are realized through multi-stakeholder collaboration and systemic integration. This makes competence for responsible stakeholder engagement critical. Consequently, educating designers to effectively engage with a wider array stakeholders may be essential for ensuring meaningful societal contributions through their professional practice, to address systemic, contextual and global challenges (Meyer and Norman, 2020).
Social responsibility in design has evolved from being an idealistic pursuit, as envisioned by Papanek (1984; Melles et al., 2011), to an imperative design practice in both industry and educational settings. The concept of responsible design has been defined as design that “responds to the needs of and challenges faced by society” (Eggink et al., 2020: 3). Further, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO 26000-2010, 2011) defines social responsibility as “The responsibility of an organization for the impacts of its decisions and activities on society and the environment, through transparent and ethical behavior that (1) Contributes to sustainable development, including health and the welfare of society, (2) Takes into account the expectations of stakeholders, (3) Is in compliance with applicable laws and consistent with international norms of behavior, and (4) Is integrated throughout the organization and practiced in its relationships.”
In this paper, we use “responsible design” and “social responsibility” as umbrella terms for design’s broader ethical commitments. We focus specifically on the stakeholder-facing dimension of responsibility, which we conceptualize as responsible stakeholder engagement and operationalize as a design competence (Responsible Stakeholder Engagement Competences; RSEC). Increasingly, designers are recognized as being responsible not only to their clients but to a broader array of stakeholders. This expanded stakeholder view reflects the growing complexity and ethical demands placed on professional design practice. It follows that responsible design competences are critical in today’s design practice. They embed environmental stewardship into design decisions to address sustainability challenges and promote social equity by engaging diverse and often marginalized stakeholder perspectives to ensure fair, inclusive outcomes (Tunstall, 2023). They also uphold ethical integrity, enabling designers to manage complex trade-offs transparently and ethically across interconnected social, environmental, and organizational contexts, in accordance with professional codes of conduct in design (Christensen et al., under review).
Despite the growing professional recognition of designers’ expanding responsibilities toward a broader set of stakeholders, current frameworks for understanding different types of stakeholders, and the competence needed for engaging with them responsibly, remain insufficient. While there are some existing tools for identifying and categorizing stakeholders in professional design contexts, and a few studies addressing trade-offs between stakeholder interests, and recognizing the barriers designers face in balancing organizational objectives with social and ethical responsibilities (e.g., Chivukula et al., 2024; Chivukula and Gray, 2025; Friedman and Hendry, 2019), there is limited understanding of what and how design education effectively trains for the competences needed to address these stakeholder challenges.
The present paper aims to address this gap by adopting stakeholder theory, traditionally applied in business ethics, to understand social responsibility in professional design. Although stakeholder theory has been applied in fields such as corporate strategy, marketing (Bhattacharya and Korschun, 2008; Jackson, 2001), and innovation (Bendell and Huvaj, 2020; Scuotto et al., 2020), its potential in design research remains largely unexplored. Stakeholder theory emphasizes the interconnected relationships between organizations and those who affects or are affected by their actions (Freeman, 1984). By applying this perspective to design education, we aim to explore which stakeholder groups that design programs target, and how this translates into training for responsible stakeholder engagement. To what extent do design programs focus on, and train for engagement with, an expanded set of stakeholders beyond traditional categories to include groups such as suppliers, marginalized groups, and future generations?
This paper contributes to the literature by applying a stakeholder theory framework in an international survey of design education programs. The survey examines what (which stakeholders) and how design programs train students for responsible stakeholder engagement, including the dilemmas, trade-offs, and balances required to achieve responsible design objectives. Specifically, we explore how the choice of stakeholder focus in design programs affects the training of RSEC.
Stakeholder engagement in design education
Decades ago, industrial design education was focused upon form and function, and designers worked mainly with manufacturing in the design of physical products. Already then Papanek criticized design education: “It is unfortunate that our design schools proceed from wrong assumptions. The skills we teach are too often related to processes and working methods of an age that has ended” (Papanek, 1984: 285). With a broadening of design activity to include interaction, services and experiences, design education began focusing on preparing students to engage users, particularly through human/user-centered and participatory design (PD) traditions. PD established the designer as a facilitator of workers’ and end-users’ situated expertise, with attention to politics, representation, and decision rights in organizational settings (Simonsen and Robertson, 2013). Subsequent co-design work reframed the designer as an orchestrator of “collective creativity,” extending participation beyond users to varied actors who shape and are shaped by design outcomes (Sanders and Stappers, 2008).
As the scope of design practice widens toward more complex organizational structures and societal agendas, scholars have called for a change in design education (Friedman, 2012; Norman, 2010). Over the past decades, design curricula have broadened their stakeholder focus, moving beyond end-users, clients and manufacturing, to include other cross-functional colleagues (e.g., in leadership, engineering, suppliers, marketing), citizens and communities in public services, and regulators and standards bodies. In this context, service design pedagogy has normalized multi-party engagements through methods such as stakeholder mapping, frontstage/backstage analysis, and journey mapping that surface interdependencies and operational constraints (Stickdorn et al., 2018; Stickdorn and Schneider, 2012).
Likewise, sustainability discourses have expanded the stakeholder focus on future generations, emphasizing planetary limits, intergenerational equity, and socio-technical transitions, while systemic and circular approaches now require designers to work across interwoven stakeholder networks. Norman’s recent work articulates this broader remit and long-horizon responsibility toward humanity (Norman, 2023), and sustainability education scholarship documents the tensions that can arise as programs attempt to embed such ambitions at scale (Boehnert et al., 2022).
As such, design has witnessed a shift from designing “things” for a limited number of stakeholders to designing socio-material assemblies (Björgvinsson et al., 2012; Kimbell, 2011) in more complex and long-term engagement with heterogenous communities and larger ecologies (Norman and Stappers, 2016; Smith and Iversen, 2018). This shift expands the scope of responsible design from individual morality to ethical interactions, infrastructures, and systems of relations. Consequently, what “stakeholder engagement” requires has changed as well. Now, designers face distributed responsibility across multiple actors, systemic and long-term impacts, and engage in ongoing negotiation rather than one-off consultation.
In a structured literature review of 62 studies on responsible design education, Feast et al. (2025) found that design education that promotes responsibility typically aims to increase ethical awareness, systemic thinking, and an understanding of design’s broader impacts on society and the environment. The review illustrated that design education addresses a diverse set of stakeholders varying across programs. Additionally, Feast et al. (2025) highlight that the shift from designing products to designing socio-material assemblies produced tensions between prioritizing immediate user needs and considering broader systemic impacts, and between ethical reflection and technical production.
Parallel research strands have strengthened the ethical commitments of stakeholder work. Value Sensitive Design (VSD) provides teachable methods such as stakeholder analyses, value scenarios, and multi-lifespan timelines, in order to integrate human values across the design life cycle (Friedman and Hendry, 2019). Similarly, scholars have examined and proposed ethics-focused design methods principles, and frameworks that engage design students and practitioners in building ethical awareness and encouraging action in their workplace (Chivukula et al., 2024; Chivukula and Gray, 2025). Design justice extends participation by centering historically marginalized communities as rights-holders and co-producers, foregrounding power, harm, and accountability (Costanza-Chock, 2020). Together, these traditions push programs from empathy as sentiment to structured ethical reasoning, positional reflexivity, and accountability mechanisms that can be taught and assessed. With the rise of systemic design and circular economy design, stakeholder engagement now spans entire socio-technical systems: upstream material suppliers, maintenance and repair communities, remanufacturers, logistics partners, investors, and end-of-life actors (Sundin, 2018). In parallel, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation and IDEO’s Circular Design Guide translates circular principles into curriculum-ready activities that connect product decisions to material flows and long-term socio-ecological outcomes (Ellen MacArthur Foundation & IDEO, 2017). These resources highlight systems thinking, relationship-building, and long-horizon stewardship as core graduate capabilities.
It is helpful to distinguish between two modes of working with stakeholders. Stakeholder work comprises the analytical tools and methods for mapping, identifying, and categorizing stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement involves interacting with stakeholders through participation, co-creation, and negotiation. Both are important but they require different capabilities: stakeholder work demands analysis and representation, while stakeholder engagement requires dialogue, collaboration, facilitation, and political negotiation (Feast, 2023). We recognize that RSEC requires capabilities in both stakeholder work and the capacity to engage with stakeholders responsibly.
The types of stakeholders that some design education programs now train students to engage with therefore include: (a) users and communities (PD/co-design); (b) clients/commissioners; (c) partners across extended value chains (suppliers, repair/remanufacture, logistics); (d) public actors (policy makers, regulators, standards bodies); and (e) future and non-human stakeholders implicated by environmental limits. Correspondingly, programs frequently target a competency cluster for responsible engagement: perspective-taking and interpretive inquiry; facilitation, mediation, and conflict navigation; ethical reasoning (including power/harm analysis); values work (stakeholder mapping, value elicitation, value scenarios, and explicit trade-off articulation); systems thinking and boundary-spanning collaboration; and organizational literacy (incentives, governance, and accountability) (Bason, 2010, 2014; Friedman and Hendry, 2019; Stickdorn et al., 2018).
Despite this broadening, there remains little consensus on what design education should teach (which stakeholders), and how they should train for responsible stakeholder engagement. The literature offers rich but fragmented stakeholder vocabularies originating from Participatory Design emphasizing emancipation and democracy for the involved, design justice centering marginalized communities and resisting harm, Value Sensitive design urging designers to go beyond serving functionality and to operate on the basis of values and even adverse value systems when designing, and furthermore, sustainable and circular design directing attention toward material stewardship as a marker for responsible stakeholder engagement. Yet, the literature offers little guidance for how the needed cross-cutting designerly competences can be trained. To address this gap, we bring stakeholder theory from management into design education. This lens recognizes that designing is embedded in organizational contexts with strategic objectives, hierarchies, and partnerships; it emphasizes value creation with and for multiple stakeholders; and it equips students to reason explicitly about trade-offs and the intertwining of economic and moral concerns. Stakeholder theory is well suited to this study because it integrates ethical, organizational, and relational dimensions that are central to responsible design. It provides structured distinctions, such as primary versus secondary stakeholders, that are not focal in design discourse, and it offers a vocabulary for understanding the trade-offs and conflicting interests designers must deal with in practice.
In the next section, we introduce stakeholder theory and use it to argue for a concrete set of competences for responsible stakeholder engagement. We then present a first global mapping of how design education programs currently address these aims.
Stakeholder theory: A theoretical framework
Stakeholder theory (Freeman, 1984; Parmar et al., 2010) offers a framework for understanding the relationships between organizations and the groups or individuals who can affect or are affected by their activities. Initially introduced in 1963 by the Stanford Research Institute and later developed by R. Edward Freeman in 1984, stakeholder theory challenges the traditional shareholder-centric view of organizations. Instead, it emphasizes that businesses are understood as a set of relationships among groups that have a stake in the activities that make up the business, such as customers, users, employees, suppliers, investors, and communities (Dmytriyev et al., 2021; Jones, 1995). These relationships are central to how organizations create and exchange value over time. The theory starts with the premise that a firm can exist and sustain itself only if it offers solutions that balance the interests of multiple stakeholders over time (Freeman and Velamuri, 2023). Sometimes stakeholder interests may conflict, and trade-offs have to be made by managers taking in perspectives from all sides (Freeman et al., 2007).
Moreover, business and ethical dimensions of organizational practice are considered inseparable. The integration thesis of stakeholder theory posits that most business decisions inherently contain ethical elements, while most ethical decisions implicitly involve business considerations (Freeman, 1984). This perspective challenges the “separation fallacy,” which assumes that business decisions can be devoid of moral content and ethical decisions can lack business relevance (Harris and Freeman, 2008; Parmar et al., 2010). Stakeholder theory asserts that every organizational action has both financial and moral consequences, blending instrumental and normative dimensions. For instance, increasing shareholder value or serving community interests can simultaneously reflect economic and ethical motivations. By rejecting the artificial division between financial and social concerns, stakeholder theory advocates for a holistic approach to organizational decision-making, where businesses address competing stakeholder interests in ways that create mutual value while maintaining ethical integrity. Accordingly, stakeholder theorists argue that relationships should be bilateral (Goodstein and Wicks, 2007) and based on the principles of fairness and reciprocity (Phillips, 2003).
Freeman broadly defines stakeholders as “any group or individual who can affect or is affected by the achievement of the organization’s objectives” (1984: 46). From the perspective of the firm, Dunham et al. (2006), argue that legitimate stakeholders are those groups that the firm fundamentally needs to exist, such as customers, suppliers, employees, financiers, and communities. The distinction between primary and secondary stakeholders helps clarify the scope of stakeholder legitimacy (e.g., Carroll and Buchholtz, 1993; Gibson, 2000). Primary stakeholders are those whose support is indispensable for the survival of the firm; they often have formal claims on the organization and may be owed special duties by management. Examples from design include clients, employees, and investors. In contrast, secondary stakeholders lack formal claims but may still be affected by the firm’s actions. While management has no formal obligations to them, secondary stakeholders are owed general moral duties such as avoiding harm and considering adverse negative and unintended consequences, for instance, marginalized users, environmental groups, or local communities. This differentiation highlights the varying levels of responsibility that organizations hold toward different stakeholder groups.
Although stakeholder theory is often articulated from a managerial perspective, designers frequently perform comparable relational functions in practice by orchestrating stakeholder interactions, mediating competing interests, and shaping value creation processes. In this sense, designers can be analytically positioned within the stakeholder-relationship role described in stakeholder theory, despite differences in formal authority. Stakeholder management approaches to design have been criticized from the perspective of participatory design (Wacnik et al., 2020), in highlighting that such approaches can be overly instrumental, assumes that stakeholders can be identified upfront, and that interests can be balanced, risking an overemphasis on consensus whereas managing adversarial situations often play-out in community oriented design (DiSalvo, 2012). Stakeholder theory is well suited to design contexts because it foregrounds how designers balance competing stakeholder interests while balancing ethical and organizational constraints.
A stakeholder framework for design
A stakeholder framework for design education.
Drawing on stakeholder theory, the framework distinguishes between primary stakeholders, who have a direct claim on the design process (e.g., users and clients), and secondary stakeholders, who are indirectly affected by design outcomes (e.g., cultural groups or future generations). Furthermore, drawing from the extensive user focus in contemporary design research, which increasingly addresses extended users, cultural minorities, future generations, and even non-human species impacted by design, we propose an analytical separation between two types of secondary stakeholders: cultural groups, and future generations. While these stakeholder groups are interconnected, their distinct treatment is necessary because the competencies and practices required for their responsible engagement differ significantly. For example, addressing cultural groups involves considerations of equity and inclusion, and often involves direct co-creation or participation, while engaging with future generations or other species typically emphasizes environmental sustainability or future design consequences, through imaginative or speculative design approaches.
The framework utilizes the distinction between the production and consumption side of design or business, which is standard terminology in business administration literature (for example, in the literature on business models), but less common in design. We recognize that a large proportion of the design literature on social responsibility and ethics has emphasized exactly the blurring or overcoming of this distinction, by proposing ways for users, communities, minorities, etc. to become part of the design process (e.g., participatory design; co-design; democratizing design; Bødker et al., 2000; Sanders and Stappers, 2008; Simonsen and Robertson, 2013), as opposed to being merely passively affected by the design outcome as consumers. This shift aligns with broader human-centered and user-centered design traditions (Norman, 2023), as well as work emphasizing situated user expertise and interpretive engagement (Suchman, 1987). Nevertheless, as we draw upon stakeholder theory from the management literature, this production/consumption distinction remains relevant also for design contexts, as it highlights the economic transaction interests amongst the stakeholders involved and the associated trade-offs and tensions. This is consistent with value-oriented design approaches that integrate user values into decision-making (Friedman and Hendry, 2019).
In this study, we contrast four groups of stakeholders across the two dimensions of primary/secondary and production/consumption type stakeholders: (1) Users and clients, (2) inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, (3) social groups and cultural stakeholders (e.g., minorities), and (4) design for the planet (e.g., future generations) (see Table 1). A main proposition which we seek to explore, is that the stakeholder groups that design education programs focus on in their training will impact upon the RSEC delivered in the program.
Responsible stakeholder engagement competences
Stakeholder theory emphasizes that effective organizational practice inherently involves competences that enable designers to engage with a broad variety of stakeholders and to deal with complex interdependencies between economic and moral considerations (Freeman, 1984). In design education, applying stakeholder theory helps articulate why certain competences are essential for responsible design practice. These competences (RSEC) involve a set of critical trade-offs implicated in stakeholder engagement, bridging design, management, and stakeholder theory perspectives.
Stakeholder engagement has been defined as those practices which an organization undertakes to involve stakeholders in a positive manner in organizational activities (Greenwood, 2007: 317). They exist within a broad range of business activities and can comprise the processes of establishing, developing, and maintaining stakeholder relations. These can include stakeholder identification, consultation, communication, dialogue, and exchange (Burchell and Cook, 2006; Greenwood, 2007: 322). We define responsible stakeholder engagement competences (RSEC) as the individual knowledge, skills, attitudes, and ethical sensitivities required to effectively identify, understand, interact with, and manage relationships with stakeholders in a way that is transparent, inclusive, ethical, and conducive to sustainable outcomes. These competences can be developed through targeted education and training aimed at enhancing the capacity of individuals to engage responsibly and constructively with diverse stakeholders. There are at least three such critical trade-offs in responsible stakeholder engagement that are grounded in recurring core concerns of stakeholder theory, and which translate into design competences.
The first trade-off is what we term “balancing perspectives.” This reflects the designer’s need to understand and integrate multiple and often conflicting stakeholder perspectives. Stakeholder theory frames organizations as networks of stakeholder relationships in which value is created and traded across multiple parties; responsible practice therefore requires the capacity to hold and balance competing stakeholder claims diverse interests within organizational practices (Freeman et al., 2007), a demand particularly pertinent in design where user needs, cultural contexts, ethical implications, and ecological considerations frequently collide. These interests also align with prior work on developing ethical sensitivity, which involves building awareness of the ethical dimensions of the situation, specifying aspects of the problem that include implicit and explicit value tensions, and an articulation of the judgments that lead to or shape design decisions (Ahmadpour et al., 2025; Boyd and Shilton, 2021). Thus, design education must explicitly train designers in competences related to empathy, perspective-taking, and reflective equilibrium (Surma-aho et al., 2022). Such training involves not only developing the capacity for designers to appreciate various stakeholder experiences but also to recognize inherent limitations and biases in comprehending divergent perspectives. Pedagogically, this competence may be fostered through scenario-based exercises, participatory methods, and iterative reflective practices, which underscore the complexities and uncertainties inherent in balancing stakeholder interests.
The second trade-off, “managing resources responsibly,” recognizes that responsible stakeholder engagement is economically demanding, thus requiring designers to balance moral imperatives with resource constraints. Stakeholder theory’s integration thesis specifically highlights how economic decisions inevitably entail moral dimensions—and vice versa (Parmar et al., 2010). Stakeholder theory explicitly connects ethics with organizing: decisions about time, budget, and attention are simultaneously economic and moral, because they determine how benefits, burdens, and harms are distributed across stakeholders and what trade-offs are made. Designers must therefore develop competences in strategic prioritization and ethical resource allocation, skills that involve economic literacy, resource management, and ethical reasoning. Design programs can effectively nurture these competences through real-world project collaborations and simulations, challenging students to make explicit trade-offs between ethical goals and economic viability. Such experiential learning contexts are vital, enabling students to confront the reality of constrained budgets, tight schedules, and finite resources while upholding commitments to stakeholders in a responsible manner.
The third trade-off, “negotiating power relations,” stems from the limited formal powers typically available to designers, necessitating skilled negotiation and stakeholder dialogue (Cipolla and Bartholo, 2014). Within stakeholder theory, effective organizational action frequently depends on negotiation processes, with mutual understanding arising through interaction rather than authoritative command (Freeman and Velamuri, 2023). It also emphasizes that stakeholders differ in salience, often shaped by power, legitimacy, and urgency, which makes responsible engagement inherently political and dependent on the ability to recognize, navigate, and broker asymmetries in influence and decision rights. Design practice, characterized by its often-informal institutional roles, particularly underscores this aspect. Prior work has shown that power relations can close down ethical and value-related considerations, as with Watkins et al.’s (2020) recognition that ethical awareness can be nullified or suppressed as part of the mediation process (Gray and Chivukula, 2019). However, Wong (2021, 2025) also illustrates how creative use of “soft resistance” tactics and attention to the infrastructure through which computing work is done can also allow designers to act in novel ways to combat institutional power. Consequently, designers must develop competences in negotiation, persuasive communication, stakeholder facilitation, and collaborative problem-solving. Design education programs can develop this competence through structured role-playing activities, stakeholder workshops, and collaborative projects. Such educational strategies prepare designers for the realities of organizational influence, acknowledging their restricted formal authority yet maximizing their capacity to advocate, persuade, and engage diverse stakeholder groups.
Incorporating these RSEC into design education addresses critical dimensions highlighted by stakeholder theory, responding to the challenges of responsible design practice. By systematically training future designers in such core competences, design education aligns itself with theoretical insights from stakeholder and management scholarship and enhances designers’ preparedness for the ethical, economic, and relational complexities in professional design practice.
Stakeholder teaching focus
In teaching future professional designers, design education programs engage design students in different kinds of activities that tend to emphasize some stakeholder perspectives over others. In educating for stakeholder engagement, design education programs need to carefully consider which stakeholder group they are to select and prioritize in their training activities. There are several reasons for this: (1) The practice of responsible design is resource demanding. Balancing more perspectives and more stakeholders complicates design processes, and adds additional resource demands that may be cognitive (e.g., imagining future users), social (e.g., involvement of users and stakeholders), material (e.g., utilizing environmentally friendly sources), economic (e.g., bearing costs for choosing suppliers and partners that act responsibly in the value chain), and so on. (2) The design competences needed to practice responsibly differ by stakeholder group. Skills and competences in co-creating with primary users are not the same as those needed to assess fair worker conditions in the supply chain. Or the knowledge and skills needed to assess potential unanticipated design consequences and biases for minority groups are not the same as the competences needed to assess the environmental impact of material application and production. As such, educating for RSEC involves training for stakeholder-specific and specialized skills and competences. However, within any given design education program, only so many competences may be trained within a given timeframe. (3) Devising a design education program involves carefully considering progression of student learning, where starting with fundamentals or basic skills is necessary, in order to later in the program extend to more complex scenarios for development of professional competences. This may entail starting a program with simple design tasks, engaging with a few primary stakeholders, and then later expand to other stakeholder groups.
For these reasons, design programs need to carefully consider which stakeholder group they include in their training for responsible stakeholder engagement, the extent to which interactions with each stakeholder group is prioritized in the program, when in the program stakeholder groups are introduced, and what to teach in relation to each group.
Institutional and program-level factors
A variety of institutional and program-level factors may influence which stakeholders design programs prioritize in their training, and how that training is conducted: Program type (e.g., architecture-, engineering-, fashion-, arts-, graphical-, digital design) may affect stakeholder type exposure and relevance; for instance, engineering or fashion design may highlight engagement with supply-chain actors, whereas this type of stakeholder engagement may be less prevalent in graphical/communication design. Program level (bachelor vs master) may shape the complexity of stakeholder engagement in that, for instance, master’s curricula can require systems thinking and conflict negotiation beyond fundamentals. Institution type (specialized design or technical university vs “broad” university) affects resources, interdisciplinarity, and proximity to management/social science education. Geographical Region (Global North vs Global South) may affect institutional agendas on how to train for responsible design practice. Finally, the decision locus over curriculum (course responsible, program director, faculty board, dean/central office) influences priority-setting and the speed and extent with which RSEC content is adopted.
The current study
Despite increased scholarly attention to responsible design, it remains unexplored how stakeholder theory may inform design education. There is limited clarity about how design programs’ targeting of different stakeholder groups influences the specific competences trained, particularly concerning responsible stakeholder engagement. To address this gap, we conducted a first global survey of design education program directors to explore the landscape of teaching for RSEC. Our survey maps program objectives, identifies which stakeholder groups are prioritized in educational activities, and examines what specific competences and skills are being taught. We also investigate the types of trade-offs and barriers that design programs address in their training. As such, our study is guided by the research question: What types of stakeholders do design education programs focus on in their teaching, and how does this stakeholder focus impact upon the responsible stakeholder engagement competences taught in the program? With this question, our study offers insights into the importance of stakeholder focus and contextual factors for design educators and curriculum developers seeking to strengthen RSEC in professional design training.
Methods
We conducted a global survey to investigate how responsible stakeholder engagement is taught in design education. The target population comprised higher-education design programs worldwide. This population is relevant for studying RSEC because design programs are the primary institutions where future designers are educated in professional design practice, including engaging with stakeholders. We focused on program leads (directors, coordinators, and managers) because these individuals have program oversight of the curriculum content, making them well-positioned to report on what and how social responsibility is taught within their programs.
Sampling strategy
While there is no single global registry that covers design programs across countries, institutional types, languages, and degree structures, our sampling strategy combined purposive and network-based approaches to capture global variation in design education. We identified potential respondents from three primary sources: (1) the Cumulus Association’s member institutions listed on their website, (2) institutional affiliations of authors published in the Design Research Society’s Digital Library website (2002–2022), and (3) mapping of Nordic design programs. These networks represent established global associations for design education across diverse geographical regions, institutions, and disciplines. We distributed the survey via direct email to program leads. Recipients who were not eligible were encouraged to distribute the invitation to relevant persons within their institutions. Additionally, we used in-person recruitment at the 2024 Design Research Society Conference in Boston and at the 13th Relating Systems Thinking and Design Symposium in Oslo. Data collection took place between June 2024 and March 2025.
Because there is no comprehensive global registry of design education programs, this field specific network-based sampling strategy was employed, in order to cover heterogeneity across institutions and programs, since it would not be possible to produce estimates at the population level.
Sample
Participants consisted of 155 individual program directors, coordinators, and program managers covering different design education programs. A separate response was recoded for each program the participant was responsible for. Of the 174 completed surveys, seven responses were excluded due to issues related to response quality and eligibility, resulting in a final analytical sample of 167 program-level responses. The achieved sample size was determined by field access and response volume during the data-collection window rather than by a predefined target for population estimation. The sample is sufficient for the purpose of estimating associations between stakeholder teaching focus and RSEC, rather than for estimating population parameters.
Participants by role.
Participants by institution and program type.
With regard to geographical distribution, 83% of participating institutions were located in the Global North, while 17% were in the Global South. Participating institutions from the Global North were distributed across Europe (66%, with 22% from the Nordic countries), North America (11%), Oceania (5%), and Asia (1%). The sample is likely skewed toward programs in the Global North. This overrepresentation is understandable because design entered the university system relatively recently, first in North America in university departments of art and design, and then, in the UK, when art and design schools and polytechnics were merged into universities (Feast, 2023: 519). Europe and other nations followed soon after (Clark, 1995: 245). Today, the greatest growth in new design programs is in Asian nations. However, the sample’s breadth across diverse educational contexts, including institutional types, program levels, and disciplinary orientations, supports the development and testing of theory of how stakeholder focus relates to social responsibility in design education, rather than statistical generalization to the population worldwide.
Materials
We surveyed constructs for design program characteristics; program objectives; toward which stakeholders the program aims in their teaching of social responsibility; and the extent of teaching directed toward different stakeholder groups: (1) Users and clients, (2) inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, (3) social groups and cultural stakeholders, and (4) design for the planet. Finally, we surveyed to what extent the program teaches for RSEC.
Measures
This study employs a set of self-developed measures, grounded in stakeholder theory, to assess programs’ teaching for responsible stakeholder engagement (RSEC), along with design programs’ stakeholder-focused teaching emphases. All multi-item constructs were tested using exploratory factor analysis and structural equation modeling (SEM).
Responsible stakeholder engagement competences
The primary dependent variable is a higher-order latent construct labeled Responsible Stakeholder Engagement Competences (RSEC), composed of three conceptually distinct subdimensions. Together, these dimensions capture how design programs educate for engaging responsibly with stakeholders, focusing on managing limitations, barriers, and trade-offs when engaging with stakeholders. The full 12-item RSEC scale demonstrated excellent internal consistency (α = 0.91), and all three subscales were also analyzed individually.
Balancing Perspectives (4 items, α = 0.79): Measures how programs train for managing cultural complexity, balancing multiple stakeholder perspectives, cognitive biases, and limits to user empathy. Sample item: “In our program, we educate students on how they can manage tradeoffs between client requests and social responsibility.”
Negotiating Power Relations (5 items, α = 0.84): Measures how programs train students to recognize and navigate the (perceived) limitations of the designer’s institutional role, influence on stakeholders, and the political nature of design work. Sample item: “In our program, we educate students on how they can manage limits to the designer’s institutional power.”
Managing Resources Responsibly (3 items, α = 0.79): Measures training in how to responsibly balance resource limitations (e.g., time, funding, staff) when working responsibly. Sample item: “In our program, we educate students on how they can balance economic objectives and social responsibility.”
Stakeholder focus in teaching
Four independent constructs were developed to measure the extent to which design programs emphasize different stakeholder groups in their teaching. Respondents rated each item on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from “We do not teach this in any course” to “We teach this in most/all courses.”
The first construct covered Teaching Focus on primary stakeholders on the consumption side of design in the form of Users and clients (5 items, α = 0.83), sample item: How extensively do you teach knowledge, skills, and abilities related to user empathy or understanding?
The second construct measures Teaching Focus on primary stakeholders on the production side of design, in the form of inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders (e.g., suppliers, employees) (5 items, α = 0.87). Sample item: How extensively do you teach knowledge, skills, and abilities related to understanding global supply chains or manufacturing processes?
The third construct measures Teaching Focus on secondary stakeholders on the consumption side in the form of social groups and cultural stakeholders (e.g., minorities) (8 items, α = 0.91). Sample item: How extensively do you teach knowledge, skills, and abilities related to designing for accessibility?
The fourth construct measures Teaching Focus on secondary stakeholders on the consumption side in the form of sustainable design for the planet (e.g., future generations, other species) (5 items, = 0.95). Sample item: How extensively do you teach skills and abilities related to analyzing environmental impact of products (e.g., Life-cycle assessment or ecological footprint analysis)?
Control variables
To control for institutional variation across the sample, we included several variables. First, we controlled for institution type, using a binary variable distinguishing Arts and Broad Universities from Design, Architecture and Technical University. Second, we included a categorical variable for program type, grouping programs into four domains: (1) Architecture or Engineering, (2) Broad across categories, (3) Fashion or Arts, and (4) Digital, Graphical or Communications. We further controlled for degree level by indicating whether the program was part of a bachelor’s or master’s degree. Further, we included a measure of institutional locus of decision making (top-down vs bottom-up) on how to teach for social responsibility. Finally, we also included a control for geographical location in either the Global North or the Global South.
Descriptive statistics and correlations for all study variables.
Reliability and validity checks
Several checks were conducted to assess reliability and validity.
Ecological validity
To assess the ecological validity of the survey responses, we conducted an external coding of 25 design programs that had provided links to their official program webpages (targeted at prospective students). A student assistant, blind to the survey results, assessed these webpages using a 5-point Likert scale for explicit references to four stakeholder groups: (1) Users and clients, (2) inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders, (3) social groups and cultural stakeholders; (4) design for the planet. Most webpages emphasized technical courses, teaching approaches, and industry relations, with limited explicit mention of sustainability or cultural issues. Correlations between self-reported survey responses and webpage rating were statistically significant for the stakeholder groups of Users and clients (r = 0.53, p = .007) and inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders (r = 0.41, p = .042), but not for social groups and cultural stakeholders (r = 0.13, p = .55) or design for the planet (r = 0.27, p = .19). The lower and insignificant correlations may reflect limited variance in these dimensions on program webpages.
Concurrent validity
To assess concurrent validity, we examined whether programs’ self-reported stakeholder engagement aligned with their teaching content. Across all four stakeholder categories, moderate and statistically significant correlations were observed: Users and clients (r = 0.49, p < .001), inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders (r = 0.50, p < .001), social groups and cultural stakeholders (r = 0.47, p < .001), and design for the planet (r = 0.45, p < .001). These findings indicate internal consistency in how programs characterize their stakeholder orientation and their teaching practices.
Results
Descriptive statistics and correlations
Table 4 presents descriptive statistics and correlations for all study variables. Most programs were situated at arts or broad universities (M = 0.63, SD = 0.48), and 42% were master’s-level programs. Most programs were situated in the Global North (M = 0.83, SD = 0.38).
In terms of Teaching Focus, programs reported their highest emphasis on stakeholders in the form of Users and clients (M = 3.88), followed by social and cultural groups (M = 3.39), design for the planet (M = 3.27), and lowest for inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders (M = 2.66). These patterns suggest a stronger orientation toward users, clients, and broader societal concerns compared to inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders. The four scales assessing Teaching Focus for specific stakeholder groups were moderately intercorrelated (r = 0.41 to 0.59, all p < .001), suggesting related but distinct emphases in stakeholder focus.
With regard to RSEC outcomes, mean levels were similar for two of the three subdimensions: Balancing Perspectives (M = 3.79) and Managing Resources Responsibly (M = 3.79), with slightly lower scores for Negotiating Power Relations (M = 3.44). The three RSEC subscales were strongly intercorrelated (r = 0.71 to 0.92, all p < .001), providing empirical support for their combination into a single higher-order construct.
Several institutional and contextual variables were weakly associated with outcomes. Programs at broad universities reported higher overall RSEC (r = 0.20, p < .05), particularly on Balancing Perspectives (r = 0.21, p < .05), and also reported greater emphasis on Teaching Focus toward social groups and cultural stakeholders (r = 0.23, p < .05). Programs characterized by top-down teaching decision locus for showed stronger Teaching Focus on Users and clients (r = 0.26, p < .01). Additionally, programs located in the Global North reported slightly higher levels of Teaching Focus on social groups and cultural Stakeholders (r = 0.18, p < .05). Overall, results suggest coherent constructs for RSEC and Teaching Focus scales and meaningful associations with some contextual variables.
Institutional differences
Means and t-test for study variables.
Note. Means are shown for all study constructs across key institutional categories. RSEC refers to the composite scale for Responsible Stakeholder Engagement Competences, which includes three subdimensions: Managing Resources Responsibly, Balancing Perspectives, and Negotiating Power Relations. Teaching Focus variables refer to four distinct stakeholder-directed teaching constructs: Users and clients, inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, social groups and cultural stakeholders, and design for the planet.
Significance levels indicate differences relative to the global mean (t-test): *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
Architecture and engineering programs reported significantly lower emphasis on teaching focus related to three key stakeholder groups: Users and client, inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, and social groups and cultural stakeholders. In contrast, programs categorized as Broad Across Categories scored higher across all three RSEC subscales and reported greater Teaching Focus on both users and clients, inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, and social groups and cultural stakeholders. Fashion or Arts programs showed lower Teaching Focus scores on users and clients. Digital, Graphical, or Communications programs reported higher levels of Teaching Focus on users and clients, but showed significantly less emphasis on design for the planet.
Relationship between teaching focus and RSEC
To investigate how different stakeholder-specific teaching practices predict RSEC in design education, we estimated two structural equation models (SEMs). In both models, four latent constructs representing stakeholder-oriented Teaching Focus (Users and clients, inter- and intraorganizational, social groups and cultural stakeholders, design for the planet) served as independent variables. The dependent variable was the higher-order latent outcome variable capturing RSEC, composed of 12 observed items grouped into three theoretically grounded subdimensions (Managing Resources Responsibly, Negotiating Power Relations, and Balancing Perspectives). These SEMs allowed for simultaneous estimation of how different teaching emphases relate to programs’ reported capacity to equip students with the competences needed to engage responsibly with diverse stakeholder groups.
Full model
The full model (Figure 1) included all four stakeholder Teaching Focus dimensions as predictors of RSEC. Fit statistics indicated an acceptable model fit: CFI = 0.898, TLI = 0.885, RMSEA = 0.068, 90% CI [0.061, 0.075], and SRMR = 0.077. The model’s log-likelihood was −7023.83, and information criteria supported a reasonable overall fit (AIC = 14319.66; BIC = 14743.71). Full model SEM results predicting RSEC. Note. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
The strongest and only significant predictor was a Teaching Focus on inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders (β = 0.42, p < .001), suggesting that when programs emphasize teaching directed toward inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, they are also more likely to report educating for overall RSEC. Teaching focused on social groups and cultural stakeholders showed a marginal association with RSEC (β = 0.19, p = .093), while teaching directed toward users and client stakeholders (β = 0.17, p = .179) and design for the planet (β = −0.13, p = .200) were not significantly associated with the RSEC outcome.
Parsimonious model
To test the robustness of the full model findings and evaluate model parsimony, a second SEM was estimated using only three teaching dimensions (excluding design for planet stakeholders). The number of indicators per latent factor was also reduced. The parsimonious model demonstrated weaker fit overall: CFI = 0.843, TLI = 0.826, RMSEA = 0.090, 90% CI [0.082, 0.098], and SRMR = 0.083. However, the information criteria were improved (log-likelihood = −5947.40; AIC = 12092.81; BIC = 12401.49), suggesting a more efficient parameterization, albeit with trade-offs in model fit.
Within the parsimonious model, a Teaching Focus on inter- and intraorganizational remained a significant predictor of RSEC (β = 0.34, p = .001). Notably, teaching focused on social groups and cultural stakeholders became a significant predictor (β = 0.26, p = .014), while Teaching Focus on Users and clients remained non-significant (β = 0.08, p = .489).
Overall, results consistently indicate that teaching practices directed at inter- and intraorganizational and social groups and cultural stakeholders are most consistently associated with reported teaching of RSEC in design programs. The results from the full model provide slightly better overall fit and a more comprehensive account of the latent constructs. The parsimonious model confirms core findings, particularly the predictive strength of teaching directed at inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders, but at the cost of explanatory power. Teaching directed at design for the planet did not emerge as a significant predictor, which may reflect that such teaching often emphasizes material competences above stakeholder engagement competences.
Post-hoc analysis
Hierarchical regression results. Teaching focus and RSEC subdimensions.
Note. *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001.
Managing resources responsibly
The initial model including only institutional controls shows no significant predictors of the Managing Resources Responsibly subscale. However, when adding teaching focus constructs, Teaching Focus on inter- and intraorganizational stakeholders emerged as the only significantly predictor (β = 0.36, p = .003).
Balancing perspectives
In the model with only institutional controls, programs categorized as Broad Across Categories reported significantly higher levels on the Balancing Perspectives subscale (β = 0.50, p = .009). When adding teaching constructs, teaching directed at users and clients (β = 0.20, p = .048) as well as social groups and cultural stakeholders emerged as the only significant predictors (β = 0.26, p = .003). Notably, neither teaching focusing at inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders, nor design for the planet were significant, suggesting potential mediation or shared variance.
Negotiating power relations
Institutional controls did not significantly predict variation in the negotiating power relations subscale. However, when including Teaching Focus constructs, inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders again show a robust and significant relationship (β = 0.26, p = .004). Interestingly, master’s-level programs (cf. bachelor’s-level) were significantly associated with higher scores on this subscale (β = 0.31, p = .023), indicating that teaching for the management of power relations are taught more often at master’s level.
Summary across models
Across all three RSEC subdimensions, teaching directed toward inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders emerged as the most consistent and robust predictor of overall RSEC, particularly for Managing Resources Responsibly and Negotiating Power Relations. Teaching directed at social groups and cultural stakeholders along with teaching focus on users and clients significantly predicted Balancing Perspectives but did not generalize to the other dimensions once institutional controls were included. Teaching directed at design for the planet did not significantly enhance Responsible Stakeholder Engagement in design programs. However, teaching focusing on users and clients had a high average score (M = 3.88), and further analysis indicates a potential ceiling effect, with responses clustering at the upper end of the scale. This limited variance may partly explain the non-significant predictive relationship between users and clients and RSEC in both the SEM and post-hoc models (i.e., since most design programs maintain a high user/client focus, such a focus may not lead to any differential effects across programs for RSEC). The overall findings of the post-hoc analysis align with the SEM results, further reinforcing the interpretation that teaching directed at inter- and intraorganizational as well as social groups and cultural stakeholders plays a central role in developing students’ RSEC.
Discussion
This paper set out to bring conceptual clarity and empirical insight to the question of what responsible stakeholder engagement is in design, and how design programs train for it. We integrated stakeholder theory into design education to specify what “responsible” engagement actually requires, namely, several distinct, teachable competences. We developed the Responsible Stakeholder Engagement Competences (RSEC) measure and theorized it as a higher-order construct with three subdimensions: Balancing Perspectives, Negotiating Power Relations, and Managing Resources Responsibly that together capture how designers learn to create value with and for multiple stakeholders under real constraints. We argued that programs typically need to prioritize among stakeholder groups in their training since not every course or program can do everything, and asked how programs plan and sequence stakeholder perspectives across curricula. Finally, we offered a first global mapping of how design programs report teaching for responsible stakeholder engagement. Taken together, the findings empirically support RSEC as a multidimensional construct, showing that Balancing Perspectives, Managing Resources Responsibly, and Negotiating Power Relations are shaped by distinct stakeholder emphases. This sharpens RSEC as a program-level framework for understanding how design education can develop responsible stakeholder engagement.
Our analyses consistently showed that the type of stakeholders design programs focus on matters for the level and type of RSEC in their program. We contend that professional responsible design involves the capability to manage systemic stakeholder engagement responsibilities within their organizational context. The strongest, most consistent result supports this: teaching focused on inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders is the most robust predictor of an educational program’s teaching for competences in responsible stakeholder engagement in practice (e.g., β = 0.42, p < .001 in full SEM; β = 0.34, p = .001 in parsimonious SEM). Several design traditions have critiqued the stakeholder concept as overly managerial or insufficiently attentive to power, justice, and community agency. While these critiques are important, we use stakeholder theory here as an analytical lens to clarify responsibility, trade-offs, and competing claims within design education. Focusing on the organizational context of design activity directly predicts the competence to satisfy different stakeholders’ interests over time while managing trade-offs and understanding stakeholder priorities and concerns. Programs with greater emphasis on inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders (e.g., internal colleagues, suppliers, implementation partners) report higher overall RSEC, with especially clear gains in Managing Resources Responsibly and, to a lesser extent, Negotiating Power Relations. This relationship is theoretically plausible, as inter- and intraorganizational activity inherently involves resource constraints and often explicit power negotiations among actors. Although this finding is not surprising, it is important because it empirically confirms that organizationally oriented curricula strongly support RSEC, despite these stakeholders receiving relatively little emphasis in design education. There is also partial evidence that teaching directed at social groups and cultural stakeholders (e.g., communities, inclusion, accessibility, and equity) supports RSEC, most notably for Balancing Perspectives. By contrast, teaching focusing on users and client did not predict higher RSEC, plausibly due to potential ceiling effects: user-centric approaches are so widely embedded that additional emphasis yields little variance in reported competence. Likewise, a focus on design for the planet did not predict RSEC; one explanation is that sustainability-oriented courses often target material properties, life-cycle assessment, and environmental impact accounting rather than stakeholder engagement entailing, for example, imagining consequences for future generations or other species. Beyond stakeholder emphases, we observed institutional influences on RSEC (e.g., program level), and program types displayed contrasting stakeholder teaching profiles that aligned with different RSEC subdimensions.
The most consequential finding is the strong association between organizational stakeholder focus and overall RSEC, despite this stakeholder set being the least targeted in design program curricula. This pattern coheres with the paper’s theoretical move: stakeholder theory situates design inside organizations (Freeman, 1984) with strategic objectives, hierarchies, time and budget constraints, and accountability regimes. Educating students to engage organizational actors equips them to surface and negotiate cross-functional goals and constraints; reason explicitly about trade-offs between economic, social, and moral objectives; mediate conflicts and manage power asymmetries between decision-makers and affected groups; and plan implementation into procurement, operations, compliance, and service delivery.
Why, then, is engagement with organizational stakeholders somewhat underrepresented in design programs? Historically, design education grew from user-centric traditions that foregrounded designerly interests on the consumption side (Sanders and Stappers, 2008; Simonsen and Robertson, 2013). Much of subsequent design research have maintained consumption-side interest, albeit extending it to new types of secondary stakeholders (Costanza-Chock, 2020; Tunstall, 2023). Meanwhile, the organizational means, governance, budgeting, incentives, performance metrics, and institutional power, were often considered outside the designer’s scope of operations or delegated to subsequent “implementation.” Our mapping suggests that this omission may now constrain and complicate responsible practice. Importantly, our findings do not suggest displacing a teaching focus on users/client, culture, or the planet; rather, organizational literacy may be the scaffolding that allows user/client, culture, and planetary commitments to stick in complex systemic delivery environments (Boehnert et al., 2022; Norman, 2023).
These findings can therefore be read alongside established design traditions such as participatory design, co-design, value sensitive design, design justice, and sustainability-oriented design, all of which emphasize responsibility but from different normative standpoints. Importantly, not all approaches to design education is oriented toward implementation or production; speculative, community-based, and expressive forms of design also engage stakeholders in ways that foreground power relations and perspective balancing. RSEC therefore applies across diverse forms of design practice, even where organizational delivery or implementation is not the primary goal. Strengthening RSEC therefore does not necessarily require expanding stakeholder scope, but can also be improved through the quality of engagement. Programs could deepen responsible stakeholder engagement through enhanced facilitation practices, ethical reflection, community co-design, cultural humility, and equity-centered methods, with organizational literacy serving as one, not the only, pathway for supporting responsible engagement.
The null-effect for teaching focusing on users and clients for responsible competences can be read as a success story: when almost all programs already teach user engagement, its presence no longer distinguishes programs on RSEC. At the same time, user-centric training alone may be insufficient to grow competences in Negotiating Power Relations or Managing Resources Responsibly, which require handling conflicting mandates, authority, and resource allocation. The partial effect for social groups and cultural stakeholders on RSEC is consistent with the idea that attention to inclusion, accessibility, and cultural legitimacy builds perspective-taking and the skills to hold competing value claims in view; competences central to Balancing Perspectives. Finally, the null-effect for teaching focus on design for the planet may reflect curriculum choices: courses that prioritize material choices and life-cycle impacts are indispensable for sustainability, but they may not exercise the actual stakeholder engagement, conflict mediation, and trade-off negotiation that RSEC measures.
Together, these results suggest that educating students for responsible design requires expanding the scope of design activity beyond devising solutions or giving form to artifacts. Focusing solely on usability, inclusivity, or sustainability separately from the organizational context may not build the capacity to manage responsibility effectively. Designers must connect their concerns for users, communities, and the planet to the organizational contexts and systems where design decisions are implemented. This insight shifts the focus of responsible design from an individual designer’s ethical stance or an artifact’s material properties to an expanded design process that includes shaping the organizational context, constructing problem frames within systems, and evaluating outcomes based on systemic fit and stakeholder implications. Returning to the problem identified in the introduction, these results demonstrate how stakeholder theory offers a coherent perspective on stakeholder engagement that may connect across the many fragmented ways responsibility is addressed in the design literature. By clarifying stakeholder categories, and which stakeholder emphases support which competences, the study shows how programs can more deliberately structure responsible design education. In this way, design is reconfigured as a situated competence grounded in a designer’s ability to shape, manage, and negotiate the organizational context in which design processes and decisions unfold. Moreover, ethnographic and critical qualitative studies have demonstrated how professional design and future-making are embedded in, and deeply shaped by, distinct organizational dynamics (e.g., Gray and Chivukula, 2019; Lindberg et al., 2021; Rattay et al., 2025; Shilton, 2013; Wong, 2021)—what has been referred to as political economies of design and futures (Brandt and Vangkilde, 2024; Flynn, 2009). Accordingly, teaching students to engage with organizational dynamics appears to equip designers with the procedural rationality necessary to “design the situation” within which responsible design can emerge (Feast and Laursen, 2023). Furthermore, responsible design entails more than formulating reasonable solutions; it requires constructing problem frames attuned to stakeholder systems and organizational structures. This conclusion resonates with Schön’s (1954: 184) claim that a practical problem is resolved only when its formulation adequately addresses the real problematic situation. Our results reinforce the argument that responsible design involves more than creating artifacts; it consists of designing the situations in which responsibility can be exercised and sustained while also recognizing that responsibility can, in some cases, fail to be brokered due to larger economic considerations that are unable to be confronted by designers, even when they operate through collective action.
Implications for curriculum design
The findings suggest treating stakeholder focus as a program-level design variable rather than an opportunistic, course-by-course add-on. Programs can begin by mapping where perspectives for users and clients, inter- or intraorganizational stakeholders, social groups and cultural stakeholders and design for the planet are intentionally taught and assessed across the degree and then rebalance coverage so that organizational stakeholder engagement is not left to a final capstone or internship. In practical terms, this means planning a progression in which stakeholder emphases are distributed deliberately across semesters. RSEC provides a possible scaffold for sequencing competence development. Early coursework can concentrate on Balancing Perspectives through user and community engagements that build disciplined empathy and interpretive inquiry. Late-stage experiences could then exercise Negotiating Power Relations and Managing Resources Responsibly by placing students inside governance, budget, time, and compliance constraints, for example, using live briefs, cross-functional simulations, or policy-inflected service challenges. Across these experiences, assignments should require explicit trade-off reasoning (e.g., “Which stakeholder claims were prioritized and why? What harms were anticipated and mitigated? How were organizational constraints addressed?”), with rubrics that evaluate the justification of decisions.
This curriculum aligns with established design pedagogy, shifting from individual empathy to systemic complexity. Sequencing Balancing Perspectives early trains students to practice empathy and adopt diverse viewpoints, as Surma-aho et al. (2022) advocate. As students enter high-stakes educative experiences involving Negotiating Power Relations, the curriculum may enhance developing a “virtuous character” (Haug, 2017). This stage helps students navigate conflicting stakeholder demands and the tension between ethical ideals and professional reality. Ultimately, embedding Managing Resources Responsibly within late-stage constraints mirrors the “integration thesis” (Parmar et al., 2010); it teaches that material trade-offs are not mere logistical hurdles but ethical acts that define professional integrity.
Finally, programs could monitor program-level coherence to ensure that students practice and receive feedback on all RSEC subdimensions across coursework. In short, building responsible stakeholder engagement competences means designing the curriculum itself as a stakeholder system, and foregrounding organizational engagement as the machinery that enables user and planetary commitments.
Limitations
This study relies on self-reported data from program leads, a method that may reflect idealized representations of curricula. Program directors may not have full knowledge of or visibility into all courses, pedagogical experiments, or informal teaching practices within their programs. This could potentially lead to uneven reporting of certain activities. In addition, key concepts used in the survey (e.g., responsibility, stakeholder engagement, competences) may be interpreted and framed differently across institutions, disciplines, and cultural contexts, potentially introducing some variation in how responses reflect what is considered “good” or “extensive” practices. Given the sampling strategy, findings should be interpreted as analytic generalizations: they test and refine a stakeholder-theory-based account of how different stakeholder emphases in teaching relate to reported RSEC. External generalization to the full global population of design programs is constrained, especially because the sample is skewed toward the Global North (83%). The composition of the sample (Tables 2–3) is therefore reported transparently to support contextual interpretation of the results. As with most survey-based SEM studies, statistical power depends on model complexity and effect sizes; while adequate for detecting the observed associations, smaller or context-specific effects may remain undetected.
A further potential limitation is that program-type differences may partly reflect confounding variation in program-level resources. Domains such as engineering, fashion, or arts design can operate with systematically different budgets, staff–student ratios, and faculty capacity to support and oversee stakeholder-engagement training. Such resource differences could influence both the extent of stakeholder-focused teaching and the reported levels of RSEC, but they cannot be disentangled from program-type effects in the present study.
While the survey employed validity checks, it did not assess student-level learning outcomes or instructional quality. Future research should triangulate these findings with ethnographic, curricular, and student-centered data to better understand how competences are formed in practice.
Contributions and future directions
Conceptually, this paper advances the design field by anchoring design education in stakeholder theory, clarifying that responsible engagement requires multiple competences; operationalizing those competences in the measure of RSEC with three subdimensions that vary across program types; and mapping how programs currently teach responsible stakeholder engagement, revealing gaps in their organizational emphasis. Empirically, the analyses indicate that inter- or intraorganizational stakeholder focus is a key lever for raising RSEC, while users and clients and design for the planet emphasis—though important—may not by themselves build the competences that allow responsible intentions to survive contact with organizational realities. Looking ahead, several avenues appear promising. First, pedagogical experiments that deliberately add organizational stakeholder engagements (e.g., governance-rich live projects or cross-functional simulations) would test whether the observed associations are causal and identify effective teaching patterns. Second, longitudinal and comparative studies, including programs in the Global South and non-English contexts, could examine how stakeholder emphases evolve, and how competences transfer into practice. Together, these steps would help move the findings from mapping to improving responsible stakeholder engagement in design education. Further conceptual work is also needed. As documented in this study, design programs seem preoccupied mainly with stakeholders on the consumption side, while maintaining less focus on the production side. Such a disciplinary focus may inform stakeholder theory through contrasts to other disciplines: What are the consequences of such a stakeholder focus for designerly identities (cf. other professional identities) and the ethical stakeholder questions raised in design (cf. ethics in other disciplines)?
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
We thank Noah Morell for his assistance in the data collection.
ORCID iDs
Ethical considerations
The Ethics Committee of Copenhagen Business School waived the need for ethics approval for the collection, analysis and publication of this non-interventional survey.
Consent to participate
Respondents gave consent before initiating the survey.
Author contributions
CRediT: Christensen: Conceptualization (lead), methodology (equal), investigation (equal), project administration (lead), and writing—original draft (lead). Feast: Conceptualization (supporting), investigation (equal), writing—original draft (supporting), and methodology (equal). Arendt: Methodology (equal), formal analysis (lead), and writing—original draft (supporting). Laursen: Funding acquisition (lead), conceptualization (supporting), and writing—review and editing (equal). Krogh, Gray, and Vangkilde: Conceptualization (supporting) and writing—review and editing (equal).
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Independent Research Fund Denmark (grant number 2115-00014B).
Declaration of conflicting interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Generative AI disclosure
ChatGPT 4.0 was used in the conceptual stage of writing this manuscript as a source of inspiration, and for minor language editing and formatting when finalizing the manuscript.