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Category: reports & essays

Civic Virtue among Engineers

Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2025. “Civic Virtue among Engineers.” Virtues & Vocations, Spring 2025. https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Link

https://socialconcerns.nd.edu/virtues/magazine-home-spring-2025/civic-virtue-among-engineers/.

Introduction

My undergraduates at Olin College of Engineering want to make a positive impact. They see engineering as a career path to building a better world. Their initial theories of change are often naive. But I want them to hold onto the hope of positive impact through four years of equations, prototypes, and internships, and feel like they can live their values wherever their careers take them.

A Culture of Disengagement

The fields of engineering and computing have been experiencing a rightful reckoning with the negative impacts of emerging technologies. Their traditional models of personal, professional, and corporate ethics have long been lacking. Now citizens and their governments are realizing their inadequacy.

New research, curriculum, and ethics codes have emerged in response to the global focus on technology ethics. I’ve participated in countless conferences and meetings with scholars, educators, and practitioners trying to figure out how higher education can cultivate the necessary critical mindsets and ethical skills of technologists. I’ve introduced many of the novel ideas, frameworks, and approaches into the design, computer science, and social science courses I teach.

I’m reaching some students, but not all, and not always in the ways I hope to. Student reactions seem to fall into a few, rough categories: (1) Woah! Engineers have done some really bad things. I don’t want to be an engineer anymore. (2) Ethics and responsibility seem important, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the kind of engineering I want to do. (3) You can’t anticipate how people will misuse technology. This is just the cost of innovation and progress. (4) Building technology in an ethical way sounds like exactly what I want to do. But I’m not seeing job postings for “Ethical Engineer.” Can I get a job doing this?

Sadly, most reactions are not in the minor success that is Category 4. Most are in the spectrum of failure represented by Categories 1–3. In these failure modes, critical examination of how technology is created and its impacts on the world erodes responsibility and the hope of positive impact and elicits defensiveness.

Four years isn’t much time, and the mentorship my colleagues and I offer is only a sliver of the learning experiences students will have during their undergraduate education. I want to make the most of it. I want to increase the likelihood that I cultivate their fragile hope and equip them with sophisticated theories of change.

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The Responsibility to Not Design and the Need for Citizen Professionalism

Erhardt Graeff1 Comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2020. The Responsibility to Not Design and the Need for Citizen Professionalism. Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility: The Past, Present and Future Values of Participatory Design. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.c8387014

Link

https://doi.org/10.21428/93b2c832.c8387014

Abstract

I advise two programs at Olin College of Engineering that invite undergraduate students to conduct community-engaged design work. In the fall of 2019, project teams in both of those programs decided not to design systems requested by their outside collaborators based on ethical concerns about the harm they might cause. This paper briefly describes how those decisions came to be, the need to educate for and celebrate design refusal, and how this exemplifies the need to develop the next generation of designers and technologists to be citizen professionals.

Fostering the Good, Responsible Technologist to Face any Dilemma

Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Link

Accepted Workshop Papers

Abstract

Educational institutions producing graduates who design and implement the technology changing our world should be thinking deeply about how they are fostering good, responsible technologists. This paper introduces a workshop activity meant to start a conversation among faculty, staff, and students about which attributes we most want our graduates to develop and how those attributes might help them address dilemmas of technology’s negative consequences

Everyone Should Be Involved in Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Digital Surveillance Technology

Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Citation

Graeff, E. 2019. ‘Everyone Should Be Involved in Designing, Implementing, and Evaluating Digital Surveillance Technology.’ In Levinson, M & Fay, J, eds., Democratic Discord in Schools: Cases and Commentaries in Educational Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.

Link to Proof of my Chapter

https://www.academia.edu/43683257/Everyone_Should_Be_Involved_in_Designing_Implementing_and_Evaluating_Digital_Surveillance_Technology

Link to Book

https://www.hepg.org/hep-home/books/democratic-discord-in-schools

Excerpt

Although digital surveillance technologies may seem to be purely technical innovations, how technology is designed always also involves political choices. Technology design embodies the values of its designers and those who commission the design, as well as the values embedded in the underlying structures it often abstracts and amplifies. When digital surveillance technologies are used in schools without being subject to appropriate political discussion and contestation, they threaten democratic education in several ways. First, they impose a set of policies that affect the rights of students and parents without consulting them in their design and implementation. Second, they may chill legitimate student inquiry or even criminalize students who are researching topics or personal questions deemed taboo or dangerous according to administrators. Building on participatory design and “popular technology” principles, I thus recommend that schools involve students, parents, teachers, and administrators in collective deliberation about the design, scope, and use of digital surveillance technologies.

How Silicon Valley Can Support Citizen Empowerment

Erhardt GraeffLeave a comment

Link

https://scholars.org/contribution/how-silicon-valley-can-support-citizen-empowerment

Introduction

The 2016 U.S. presidential election stoked concerns about the potential of digital technologies to disempower citizens and erode democracy. Such concerns followed years of promises from tech companies and investors about the democratizing power of the internet. Since their founding, Twitter and Facebook have touted themselves as tools for democracy and citizen empowerment. A closer look, however, reveals that tech company incentives are often poorly aligned with the social goals they espouse and the type of good they promise to do for the world.

A new crop of companies — self-titled “civic technology” companies — are now taking the democratic mission more seriously by designing their platforms and tools with the explicit intention of promoting civic engagement. Some of these companies are nonprofits or ventures with the dual mission of making a profit and providing social benefits. Others are traditional startups financed by venture capitalists. In both cases, these companies need better metrics to ensure that their products and business designs remain aligned with their social missions.

Unfortunately, Silicon Valley companies are often judged simply on their ability to attract exponentially rising numbers of users and maintain user engagement. This standard for “success” encourages companies to work with paying customers who advertise to users and exploit their attention and data — rather than serving users in empowering ways. In turn, such standard measures are what matter to business leaders and investors. Measures of success need to change in order to encourage more tech companies to pursue democratic goals. Industry leaders, governmental and citizen users, and investors — all must create new performance standards to redefine success and hold tech companies accountable. New measures for evaluating company performance should be tied to service to democracy and to citizen empowerment.