HoosStudying; Barbed Wire Boomerang 5 views

Engineers have a responsibility to try to minimize the harm that their inventions cause. Not just from obvious effects, but to try to take a moment to imagine how a device might be misused. How it might shape a society inadvertently for the worse, not just for the intended benefit of a design. Both the STS research and the capstone project touch on the idea of minimizing unintended harm, despite at first glance seeming to be unrelated. The STS research focuses on the unintended consequences of inventions to scale animal agriculture. Specifically, how it boomerangs from non-human animal populations to humans. The capstone project worked to determine how many people were in a room to see if study spaces were free. To reduce future unintended harms in privacy issues, the project was intentionally designed to strictly record only an occupancy number. The capstone project led to a working prototype, which we called HoosStudying. It used millimeter wave radar for occupancy detection. The sensor chosen for this task makes it difficult to repurpose the prototype for the identification of a specific individual. This was chosen over more privacy-invasive options, such as cameras and microphones, where existing solutions already existed. Millimeter wave radar is used for occupancy detection by sending out a short radio chirp and looking at the signal back. The reflections coming back can be processed to tell how many people were in a room. This was then sent to a microcontroller that would smooth the noise from the occupancy data. The microcontroller sends this averaged data to a server, which then stores it. The server also has a website interface that students can access. This shows the live data of how many people are estimated in each room and has histograms to help students see when a room is typically busy. The STS research continued from the STS prospectus and led to a document understanding the intended harms of animal agriculture. It focused on the barbed wire as an example to understand the trajectories of technology that scaled animal agriculture. Society gave social permission for the barbed wire to limit non-human animal resistance. It was allowed to become cheap, inexpensive, and widely prevalent. The technology ended up “boomeranging” back to human populations to limit human resistance to oppression in similar ways. The examples examined primarily revolved around warfare and wars involving colonial powers. The barbed wire made the costs of holding humans captive much lower in the same way that it did for non-human animals. The barbed wire isn’t the end of the story. It’s a microcosm of the larger issue. This paper helps put one piece into the puzzle of how animal agriculture has shaped our society, often for the worse. This paper argues that the only likely effective way to limit this flow is to have a phase-out of animal agriculture as a whole. Both works helped to better understand how society and engineers can actually try to limit inadvertent harms. The STS research looks at a much higher level, on what societies as a whole support. If we change what we give social permission to, we can change the inadvertent harm by stopping the conditions that build pressure for an innovation that harms. The technical capstone research looks at this at a much lower level on a specific project. This meant working on a specific technical project while thinking heavily about future consequences. The design choices we made, just like the decisions a society makes, could lead to very different consequences. Instead of following along traditional camera, microphone, and other privacy-invasive paths, we decided to actually try to build something with as minimal information as possible from the beginning. This helped us get an understanding of how we can try to minimize our harm to society for all future engineering work.

BS (Bachelor of Science)

mmWave; occupancy detection; barbed wire; imperial boomerang

School of Engineering and Applied Science Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering Technical Advisor: Keith Williams STS Advisor: William Davis Technical Team Members: Yasir Babiker, Saugat Lamsal, Jeffrey Owusu, Nina Pournaras

English

2026-05-07