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The basic tenets of professional responsibility in engineering require a commitment to ideals that elevate the public health, safety, and welfare of communities while also acknowledging the complex interactions between social, environmental, and economic factors. To fulfill these tenets, engineering curriculum can enhance students’ critical thinking through the inclusion of critical narratives. Critical narratives are structured, place-based stories intended to foster connections between the audience, specific cultures, and communities. For this pilot study, seniors in capstone design courses answered questions about three critical narratives, responded to peers’ answers, and reflected on this process. Researchers sought to increase students’ critical thinking skills and their understanding of ethics and professional responsibility. This paper describes only the qualitative results from a larger quasi-experimental mixed-methods study aimed at evaluating the impacts of student engagement with critical narratives. During each stage of coding, researchers used memos to document their thinking and rationale for coding items in particular ways and calibrated to ensure that codes were validated. From these codes, the following generalized themes were identified: Critical Thinking Transference, Ethical Responsibilities, Contextualizes Professional Responsibility, and Interaction Matters. Preliminary findings suggest that engagement with critical narratives does help some students make connections between their profession and the broader impacts of engineering work. For example, the critical narratives encourage students to engage in metacognition, apply and synthesize information, practice dynamic learning, identify clear aspects of professional ethics, and see “grey” areas of ethical or moral dilemmas. Prompts to the critical narratives also encouraged students to weigh influence, potential harm, and passion in relation to their ethical responsibility as an engineer. Some students even provided unsolicited declarations of appreciation for the critical narrative intervention. Lastly, interaction with peers concerning the critical narratives encouraged meaningful dialogue about ethical dilemmas that some students might not otherwise engage in throughout the capstone design sequence.
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Letters from the Future: Exploring Ethical Dilemmas in the Design of Social Agents
We present a case-study of using Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) to surface underlying divergences, tensions and dilemmas implicit in views of the futures of ”social agents” among professional researchers familiar with the state of the art. Based on expert interviews, we designed three ”letters from the future,” research probes that were mailed to 15 participants working in the field, to encounter and respond to. We lay out the elements and design choices that shaped these probes, present our remote and asynchronous study design, and discuss lessons learned about the use of EXF. We find that this form of hybrid design/futures intervention has the potential to provide professional communities with opportunities to grapple with potential ethical dilemmas early on. However, the knowledge and tools for doing so are still in the making. Our contribution is a step towards advancing the potential benefits of experiential futures for technology designers and researchers.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1734456
- PAR ID:
- 10357153
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- CHI '22: Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 13
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3517536
