The Responsibility to Not Design and the Need for Citizen Professionalism

Abstract

I advise two programs at Olin College of Engineering that invite undergraduate students to conduct community-engaged design work. In the fall of 2019, project teams in both of those programs decided not to design systems requested by their outside collaborators based on ethical concerns about the harm they might cause. This paper briefly describes how those decisions came to be, the need to educate for and celebrate design refusal, and how this exemplifies the need to