Abstract
My technical capstone project and STS research paper are connected through a shared focus on sustainability and a motivation to analyze the ways in which it is intertwined with technology - and more specifically, software. In each, I aimed to incorporate the concept of sustainability through different perspectives and scales of analysis. My capstone project, HoosTrash, attempts to encourage environmentally conscious behavior through gamification, focusing on creating game mechanics and implementing mobile application design choices to keep users engaged and ultimately lead to sustained behavioral change. This ties into my STS research, which examines the challenges of defining and standardizing concepts across the technology industry - something that has proven to be particularly difficult for a complex and multifaceted topic such as sustainability. Together, these two projects analyze sustainability as both a design problem and a systemic issue. HoosTrash operates at the user level, influencing the interactions and behaviors of the individual user through incentives and feedback, while my STS research provides the context in which those design choices are made: A fragmented sociotechnical landscape where definitions, metrics, and responsibilities for sustainability remain disputed and often inconsistent.
In order to address issues with litter on the University of Virginia Grounds, my capstone group and I developed HoosTrash, a mobile application whose main purpose is to create a community-driven approach to maintaining cleaner public spaces. The application allows users to log collected trash, earn experience points, evolve virtual pets, and compete with other users through leaderboards and activity maps. These features were specifically chosen and implemented in order to promote engagement, encourage repeated participation, and reinforce consistent behavior within our user base. Our application was built using Flutter with a Firebase backend in order to integrate real-time data synchronization, geolocation features, and user authentication to enhance the overall user experience and accessibility. Through beta testing with a group of UVA undergraduate students, we demonstrated that HoosTrash successfully increased user engagement and motivated more consistent cleanup behavior by combining the aforementioned game mechanics with sustainability initiatives. These results suggest that gamification can serve as an effective tool for bridging the gap between environmental awareness and action. Future development of our mobile app could expand user analytics, improve social features, and add campus-specific incentives and events to further increase both engagement and measurable impact.
My STS research paper investigates why the field of software engineering has struggled to standardize methods for assessing the environmental impact of software systems. Drawing on existing literature and analyzed through Actor-Network Theory (ANT), the paper argues that this challenge stems not from a lack of technical tools, but from fragmentation across a network of actors, including researchers, developers, industry organizations, and measurement frameworks. These actors operate with differing definitions of “sustainability” and conflicting methodological approaches, preventing the formation of a stable, widely adopted standard. Existing frameworks aimed to address sustainability efforts within the technology industry often fail because they do not successfully align the interests and priorities of all relevant stakeholders, especially in practice. My STS paper concludes that significant and meaningful progress requires improved metrics, but beyond that, broader collaboration among industry professionals, more widely accepted standardized definitions, and the inclusion of social and organizational factors in sustainability assessment.
My capstone project and STS paper were not developed simultaneously. This forced me to realize the naive approach that HoosTrash was developed under in hindsight after completing my research paper. Developing HoosTrash made it clear that influencing environmental outcomes is not simply a matter of technical efficiency, but of shaping user behavior, motivation, and social engagement - insights that directly reinforce my STS argument that sustainability cannot be reduced to technical metrics alone. Reading deeper into literature surrounding the current state of sustainability in software, a critical question was brought to the forefront of my attention: Were the methods used to develop HoosTrash in direct contradiction to its intended purpose? This new perspective pushed me to consider how design decisions (such as what behaviors to incentivize or how to define “impact”) reflect assumptions about sustainability that many most likely hold inside and outside of the technology industry. It also encouraged me to think more critically about the unintended consequences and limitations of technical solutions aimed at solving complex social problems. Together, these perspectives revealed that even small-scale applications like HoosTrash can influence broader networks of actors, values, and definitions. By completing these projects sequentially, I gained a more holistic understanding of how technical systems both shape and are constrained by the social contexts in which they are developed and used, as well as how design decisions can carry implications beyond their immediate scope.
