HoosTrash; The Bhopal Gas Disaster: Was Action Even Possible? 7 views

While a gamified app to encourage trash collection does not inherently seem related to a gas disaster in Bhopal, both are impacted by human behavior. The app “Hoos Trash” incites action to clean up by creating competition and incentives in exchange for good behavior, recycling. The Bhopal disaster is the cause of human systems vice versa creating almost impossible environments to incite change. On the technical side, they both also involve the combination of human and technology working together for the better, or for the worse. Though these contexts seem like two sides of a coin, they are two sides of the same coin, and both human affecting technology as well as technology affecting humans is equally important. The technical report consisted of an IOS and Android app named Hoos Trash that turned every day trash pick up into an exciting and competitive task. There is a map of logged trash, leaderboards, and community crowd sourcing features to encourage usage. It is locally based around the University of Virginia to foster community pride, and with local trash can placements, it is easy to find disposal information. There is also specific friend and pet evolution features based on participation by the user. With social and technical features, this app produces behavioral change for the common user. The STS Research Paper was centered around the Bhopal gas release in 1984 from the Union Carbide plant. Due to disconnected emergency systems, budget cuts, and poor decision making, thousands were killed, have chronic injuries, and groundwater is even still contaminated from the methyl isocyanate. The paper’s argument was that the gas disaster was caused by a disparity between responsibility and authority to know information and produce an action. Specific, dangerous knowledge was known, yet that knowledge was useless in promoting change. The ethical framework of the distribution of responsibility, with the problem of many hands and the effectiveness requirement, was used to prove this idea of having a capacity to act. The value of working on both of these projects in the same academic year gave me great insight into the technical side of creation with a user in mind from the technical project along with insight into the ethical side of technical downfalls from the research paper. Looking in the past is very important for future creation to see exactly how decisions can create an onslaught of consequences and influence other decisions. Looking into the future is also very important for imagining possible impacts and worst-case scenarios to keep in mind with fail-safes and “redundant” systems to prevent disaster. I will apply these insights into future technical projects specifically using ethical frameworks, technical frameworks, and real-world case examples as heavy influence into decision making.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

Gamification; Bhopal; Ocean Cleanup

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Science Technical Advisor: Mark Sherriff STS Advisor: Benjamin Laugelli Technical Team Members: Gemma Zhou, Brandon Yuan, Norah Lee

English

All rights reserved by the author (no additional license for public reuse)

2026-04-28