Abstract
This undergraduate thesis portfolio presents two complementary investigations into the relationship between technology and human welfare. The first is a technical capstone project, Cell Seekers, which develops a portable radio frequency direction-finding device to support search and rescue operations. The second is an STS research paper, "The Entanglement of Technology and Society: How Design Choices Co-Produce Community Resilience and Vulnerability," which examines how design choices embedded in technologies either strengthen or erode the communities that live with them. Together, these projects reflect a shared conviction that engineering decisions carry social weight. Cell Seekers locates missing persons where GPS fails, serving teams that often operate on limited budgets. The STS research asks what conditions make a technology genuinely beneficial, illuminating accessibility, participatory design, community welfare as a core values that apply directly to a project like Cell Seekers.
Search and rescue (SAR) operations in the United States have increased dramatically, rising from under 1,000 annually in 2013–2014 to nearly 3,400 by 2022. Conventional methods such as GPS tracking become unreliable in dense forests, snowy mountains, and other environments with weak satellite service. Cell Seekers addresses this gap with a portable, handheld RF direction-finding device designed to locate the mobile phones that most missing persons carry. Existing commercial devices, such as the Hunter and the Wolfhound-PRO, report only relative signal strength and require users to manually sweep an area using technical RF knowledge. At approximately $2,000 each, they are cost-prohibitive for many volunteer organizations. Cell Seekers improves on these limitations through a direction-finding antenna array of four patch antennas whose signals are processed by custom RF circuitry to calculate bearing and estimated distance. A color display communicates this information clearly, reducing the technical expertise required in the field. The system integrates a software-defined radio and Raspberry Pi for processing, currently operating in the 1.24–1.3 GHz amateur radio band for FCC compliance, with a clear path to cellular uplink frequencies in future applications.
The STS research paper investigates: in what ways do beneficial technologies enhance social cohesion and resilience, contrasted with harmful technologies that fragment communities and create vulnerability? The analysis applies Sheila Jasanoff's co-production framework that demonstrates the idea that technologies and social orders mutually shape one another. The paper conducts a comparative case study of eight technologies: the Liter of Light, M-PESA, community radio, the Open Source Seed Initiative, the Ford Pinto, Thalidomide, OxyContin, and engagement-based social media algorithms. These studies were analyzed through participation structures, embedded values, and power relations. Beneficial technologies share the key features of participatory design, horizontal knowledge sharing, responsiveness to community needs, and trust as a structural byproduct of transparent design. Harmful technologies share the key features of profit-driven design that excludes community voices, epistemic injustice through asymmetric information, communities rendered passive recipients of corporate risk, and lasting social fragmentation. The central finding is that the technology's technical function does depict its inherent impact but who is included in its design, whose interests are embedded in its architecture, and what kind of social world it is built to co-produce.
Working on both projects simultaneously produced insights that neither could have generated alone. The most important was an acute awareness of the gap between a technology's stated purpose and its social consequences. Cell Seekers is genuinely designed to save lives but the STS research made clear that good intentions do not guarantee good outcomes as the Ford Pinto met a real transportation need and OxyContin addressed real suffering. What separates technologies that serve communities from those that harm them is not the sincerity of the motivation, but the values embedded in the design process and whether affected communities have a meaningful voice.
This realization changed how the capstone project was approached, designing an affordable device that volunteer SAR teams find accessible and resilient. The research also sharpened my thinking about ease of use: a device requiring significant technical expertise concentrates its benefits among those who already possess that knowledge, emphasizing inequalities rather than reducing them. Conversely, working through real RF engineering constraints gave me a more grounded reading of cases like the Ford Pinto as their decisions were made under genuine cost and timeline pressures, which made the STS argument about the need for ethical frameworks in engineering education land with considerably more force. Pursuing both projects together made clear that the most consequential engineering decisions are never purely technical and understanding why is itself an engineering skill.
