Abstract
Both my technical and STS projects illuminate the dangers of the lack of awareness in sociotechnical systems. The technical project addresses the lack of spatial and environmental awareness that students face when navigating UVA’s Student Health and Wellness building. The STS project examines the lack of societal and ethical awareness surrounding the development and deployment of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly how it extracts value from artists without consent or compensation. Together these projects demonstrate how insufficient awareness, whether of physical spaces or of the social and ethical implications of technology, creates significant human costs including stress, inefficiency, exploitation, and cultural harm. This synthesis argues that raising awareness is essential for designing more humane and responsible sociotechnical systems.
For my technical project, I developed an indoor positioning and navigation system for the University of Virginia Student Health and Wellness Center using Ultra-Wideband technology. Patients and visitors, especially students who may already feel unwell, often become disoriented in the multi-floor building during busy times. This problem matters because poor navigation adds unnecessary stress, wastes time, and diminishes the quality of care in a place meant to support health and well-being. The research question guiding the work was how to create a low-cost, accurate real-time positioning solution that could guide users via a mobile app without relying on GPS, which performs poorly indoors. I analyzed signal data from UWB anchors placed at strategic locations throughout the building and integrated an ESP32-S3 microcontroller with UWB modules to calculate positions using time-of-flight measurements. After extensive testing in the actual environment and refining the algorithms to handle multipath interference common in indoor settings, the system achieved consistent sub-meter accuracy. The most important finding was that a small number of carefully placed anchors could deliver reliable room-level guidance, directly improving the patient and visitor experience by reducing confusion and frustration.
In my STS research, I investigated the extractive practices underlying generative AI systems and their impact on digital artists. Many popular image-generation models are trained on vast datasets scraped from the internet, frequently including artists’ copyrighted work without permission or compensation. This problem matters because it threatens artists’ ability to control and benefit from their own work, potentially undermining the broader creative economy and raising serious questions about fairness in technological development. The central research question was how the lack of transparency and consent in GenAI training data affects the economic agency of digital artists. Through careful analysis of copyright frameworks, industry practices, legal cases, terms-of-service documents, and public statements from affected artists, I examined the power dynamics at play. My key findings revealed that current approaches prioritize rapid innovation and corporate interests over creator rights, resulting in the devaluation of human labor, reduced incentives for new creative work, and an imbalance that favors large technology companies at the expense of individual artists.
My research made a meaningful but limited contribution to addressing the broader problem of awareness in sociotechnical systems. The technical prototype successfully demonstrates that spatial awareness can be practically engineered into complex indoor environments, offering a working solution that improves navigation and reduces stress for users at the Student Health and Wellness Center. The STS analysis effectively highlights the ethical awareness gap in GenAI and shows how current practices harm creators. However, the work has clear limitations: the navigation system was developed and tested in only one building, and the STS research focused mainly on visual artists rather than the full range of creative fields. Future researchers should build on this by integrating ethical considerations much earlier in the technical design process through sociotechnical audits or ethics-by-design frameworks. They could also scale indoor navigation solutions to more varied environments and develop stronger policy recommendations that protect creators’ rights while supporting technological innovation. Overall, bridging spatial and ethical awareness remains critical for creating systems that are both technically robust and socially responsible.
I would like to thank Chuck Walcott, my manager at the Student Health and Wellness Center, who generously allowed access to the building for mapping and testing. I would also like to thank Keith Williams for being my capstone instructor and for his guidance throughout this semester. I am deeply grateful to Professor Caitlyn Wylie, my STS professor, who guided me through the ethical and societal dimensions of technology and helped me see the broader connections between my two projects.
