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This translation tutorial will demonstrate that making fairness a tractable engineering goal requires demarcating a clear conceptual difference between bias and unfairness. Making this distinction demonstrates that bias is a property of technical judgments, whereas fairness is a property of value judgments. With that distinction in place, it is easier to articulate how engineering for fairness is an organizational or social function not reducible to a mathematical description. Using hypothetical and real-life examples I will show how product design practices would benefit from an explicit focus on value-driven decision processes. The upshot of these claims is that designing for fairness (and other ethical commitments) is more tractable if organizations build out capacity for the “soft” aspects of engineering practice. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y-Dj0cw5OtE&t=7s for the presentation.
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This content will become publicly available on January 20, 2026
Addressing media and information literacy in engineering design education: Learning to design technologies in the era of science denial and misinformation
Abstract Engineering design entails making value‐laden judgments against ill‐defined, ambiguous, and/or competing sociotechnical criteria. In this article, we argue that such conditions make engineering designers particularly susceptible to the potentially deleterious effects of mis/disinformation in the processes and practices of engineering design, their engagement with people and communities, and in the production and evaluations of the artifacts they produce. We begin by critiquing dominant approaches to engineering design education, specifically, engineering education's social‐technical dualism and the ubiquitous ideology of depoliticization, which has exacerbated the effects of mis/disinformation in engineering design. We follow by outlining a framework for developing students' capacity for mitigating its effects in the specific context of engineering design thinking and making value‐laden engineering judgments and decision‐making. We envision three areas of opportunity for engineering design education to teach students strategies for navigating these challenges when engaging with (a) the processes and practices of engineering, which reflect the unique types of information students engage with across the design process, (b) people and their communities, including the strategic and careful performance of activities for gathering information, while mitigating the harms to misinformation and disinformation and maximizing the benefits of community involvement, and (c) the social and technical criteria of engineering design outcomes in the form of artifacts (e.g., products, processes).
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- Award ID(s):
- 2239348
- PAR ID:
- 10591227
- Publisher / Repository:
- JRST
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Journal of Research in Science Teaching
- ISSN:
- 0022-4308
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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