Abstract
Engineering outcomes are never purely technical, as they are shaped by the social, institutional, and economic conditions surrounding a system's development, regulation, and use. Agora: A Peer-to-Peer Rental Platform for University of Virginia Students documents the design, implementation, and evaluation of a campus-restricted rental platform intended to address the inefficiency of short-term ownership among UVA students, serving as a deliberate socio-technical intervention in which trust and accountability are encoded into the architecture rather than emerging organically. By restricting participation to verified @virginia.edu accounts, the development team attempted to negotiate interpretive flexibility among its relevant social groups before divergence could produce harm. A mixed-methods evaluation returned a sufficient mean perceived trust score relative to alternatives, suggesting that institutional restriction shapes user perception of trust despite limitations that prevent long-term conclusions.
Applying the Social Construction of Technology (SCOT) framework, Beyond Technical Flaws: Exploring the Roots of South Korea's Engineering Failures examines three high-profile disasters, the 1995 Sampoong Department Store collapse, the 2014 Sewol Ferry tragedy, and the 2024 Jeju Air crash, to demonstrate that the accountability gaps Agora works to prevent are, at larger scales and under greater institutional pressure, the precise conditions that produce catastrophic loss. Across each case, interpretive flexibility allowed unsafe norms to become embedded in standard practice, regulatory capture undermined formal enforcement, and genuine accountability only surfaced under the pressure of public outrage. Both works converge on a single argument: that safety and trust are negotiated social achievements, and that stabilization, whether of a national engineering culture or a campus rental platform, depends on whether shared values become genuinely embedded across all relevant social groups.
