Multidisciplinary Requirements Engineering for Addressing Social-Oriented Concerns

Multidisciplinary teams that include engineers as well as art and culture designers, have the potential to promote awareness of various perspectives, while practicing design thinking (DT) methods. The DT approach places the customer needs up-front, and emphasizes building empathy with users, observing their behavior, and drawing conclusions about what people want and need. In this position paper we leverage on a multidisciplinary learning experience that took place at Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art, and describe how working in such teams enhanced the realization of different stakeholders' needs while addressing their emotional state. We then illustrate our approach in the context of privacy requirements which – as former studies reveal – are often underperformed, as users' privacy concerns receive little attention.