CAREER: Developing, Designing and Distributing Technology to Increase Equitable Outcomes in Energy, Information and Aerospace Sectors

The project will create and validate a framework to explain, evaluate and prescribe approaches to designing technical systems that consider and increase equity. The project will define a scale to measure society’s relationship to technology using four categories: Concept, Artifact, Complex Product System and Complex Sociotechnical System to evaluate case studies.

These case studies will be used to develop interventions in the development, design, and distribution of technology as well as the creation of a curriculum for training graduate students and industry representatives. The project will be of interest to designers of technology, decision makers in industry, scholars of technology and students training in STEM.

Using scholarship from the history of science and political science, the project will create analytical narratives of case studies of technical systems from the Energy Sector and the Information & Aerospace Sector. The case study analysis is organized based on a Systems Architecture Framework drawn from Systems Engineering. The product of Phase I of the research agenda is a series of publications stating theoretical propositions.

Phase II of the research agenda uses the same case studies to perform or observe an intervention designed to increase equitable outcomes in the design, development, and distribution of technology. The research is complemented by an education agenda that will create curriculum modules for graduate students in the Media Lab’s Program in Media Arts and Sciences as well as short courses for the public sector that reflect how to design, develop, and distribute technology to consider multiple axes of oppression and privilege.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.