It is very important to get input from all of the stakeholders involved in a project. I agree with some of the statements above that when the inputs you get are vague it isn’t really a bad thing. The engineer has more wiggle room as to what they can do. It is the engineers job to take user wants and needs and turn them into measurable constraints and specifications. Not everyone you talk to will be an expert or be able to be as specific as you might like. As for the comment above, if there were no indicators that the scaffold would need to be entirely synthetic then that would be an error of the user. I think that it would not be the engineer providing unwanted qualities but the user failing to provide needed information or possibly the engineer was not as thorough as they should have been when going over user needs. The scaffold could have met every aspect that was provided but one detail was added at the end.