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If we see final year engineering students, not fully adopting inclusive design principles and practice, what can we do? Are we ourselves tending to draw on limited experience, given testing how appropriate solutions are in meeting psychological and physiological needs, can be difficult? Perhaps we benefit most from seeking to emulate expert practice in our taught content, from creating manageable opportunities for stakeholder feedback, or from further modelling inclusive practices in our teaching methods. Engineering UG students at the University of Southampton accept taught guidance on human-centred and inclusive design. They are encouraged to empathize with a range of perspectives and issues in pursuing their group work. To what effect? We can reflect on 50+ final year MEng design project teams’ responses in 2024 and 2025, to the question after 5 weeks, ‘What aspects of equality, diversity and inclusivity have you identified that should be considered with respect to your design and/or project management?’ In the 9-month project addressing a generally broadly-scoped design brief, the students’ responses could span many aspects. Comparing those outputs with the potential we expect from our taught inputs, we see strengths and weaknesses. Concepts and examples of application with apparent potential are ineffectively adopted. This paper examines what limits the quality of final year student responses, to propose how to better embed embodiment of aspects of equality, diversity and inclusivity. We can make our modelling of desirable behaviours more evident and seek feedback to continuously improve our influence on student and subsequent professional practice.

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