[INES Announce] Issue 17.3 of Engineering Studies

[Jessica Smith]

Happy New Year, INES! We are happy to share Issue 17.3 of Engineering Studies, available online here<https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/test20/current>. It is a special issue edited by Shaozeng Zhang and Kristina Lyons on Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration with Engineers that will resonate with many of us in our institutional locations. It includes two research articles, three Making, Doing and Critical Participation articles, and one review of Jane Calvert’s A Place for Science and Technology Studies. Thank you to Beth Reddy for serving as Associate Editor for this special issue.

See many of you for the INES workshop later this month!
Jessica

Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration with Engineers. Guest Editors: Shaozeng Zhang and Kristina Lyons

Research articles:
Someone Behind This Technology: Conversation Designers in the Artificial Intelligence Loop
Elizabeth Rodwell

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are advancing rapidly, yet their development remains opaque, particularly in terms of the collaborative practices that shape their design. This article presents findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted at a Tokyo-based conversational AI startup, supplemented by interviews with conversation designers and engineers (n = 20) working across major global tech companies. It examines how usability determinations emerge through daily negotiation between these actors and identifies two recurring modes of dialog navigated by conversation design professionals: one focused on the emotional and pragmatic needs of users, and another grounded in engineering constraints and assumptions about technical feasibility. Many conversation design and UX professionals hold academic training in the social sciences, and their work requires the ongoing translation of humanistic concepts into engineering language. While current conversation design remains largely human-authored, the balance between scripted dialog and generative AI continues to evolve. I argue that conversation designers’ social science expertise is central to how AI systems come to feel ‘human.’ Bridging literatures in user experience (UX), human–computer interaction (HCI), and science and technology studies (STS), this article addresses gaps between humanities/social science and engineering research cultures, advocating for more integrative scholarship that reflects the collaborative realities of AI development.

Rodwell, E. (2025). Someone Behind This Technology: Conversation Designers in the Artificial Intelligence Loop. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 158–169. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2575366


Assembling a New Renewables Imaginary in Sāmoa
Hugo Temby,  Faafetai Kolose&  Annie Tuisuga

To promote climate justice, we need to do things – including renewable energy projects – differently. Scholars and activists from Moana (the Pacific) have long called for attention to Indigenous ontologies in research, policy, and projects, but there are limited empirical accounts showing how such ontologies might operate in practice. Our ethnographic account of a recent, interdisciplinary collaboration on a renewable energy project in Sāmoa extends the practice architectures framework to explore the social dynamics at play as a caring machine is assembled in Oceania. Our findings, and possibly our collaboration itself, suggest an alternative renewable energy imaginary is already under construction and will be of interest to engineering studies, energy social science, critical development studies, and transdisciplinary Pacific studies.

Temby, H., Kolose, F., & Tuisuga, A. (2025). Assembling a New Renewables Imaginary in Sāmoa. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 170–183. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2575451


Making, Doing and Critical Participation articles:

Breaking Boundaries through Collaboration: A Human-Centered Framework for Fair AI Design
Shaozeng Zhang, Ethan Copple, Ana Carolina de Assís Nunes, Ali Behnoudfar &  Fuxin Li

Artificial intelligence (AI) design traditionally prioritizes full automation and broadest data coverage yet often overlooks the contextual realities of pre-existing biases in datasets and human agency in real-world applications. This article explores how cross-disciplinary collaboration can transform this paradigm by opening AI's ‘black box' of full automation to public accountability, human operation and real-world use. Based on anthropologists’ direct collaboration with computer scientists in a machine learning (ML) AI design project, this project proposes cross-disciplinary methodological innovations for algorithm design and takes up the fairness issue as an exemplary domain to experiment with our new ML model framework. We developed a new ML framework that moves beyond conventional accuracy-coverage trade-offs to incorporate a human-operable three-way balance between accuracy, fairness, and coverage. In this framework, we foreground the real-world contexts and human agency at multiple stages of AI design, from data training, decision-making, interface design to model testing. The results demonstrate both the promise and challenges of bridging academic disciplines and connecting lab-based AI development with real-world needs. While our collaboration has made AI design more accountable, it also highlights enduring tensions in balancing competing priorities like fairness, accuracy, and coverage.

Zhang, S., Copple, E., de Assís Nunes, A. C., Behnoudfar, A., & Li, F. (2025). Breaking Boundaries through Collaboration: A Human-Centered Framework for Fair AI Design. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 184–198. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2575357


Sharing Histories at the Intersection of Computer Science and Anthropology
Kendall House, John Ziker, Jerry Fails, Michael Wendell Jessi Boyer

This paper presents a critical reflection on interdisciplinary collaborations that seek to guide technical application by applying explanatory theory. It proposes that quotidian aspects of disciplinary specialization can present obstacles to interdisciplinary collaborations. This refers not to highly abstruse theory or complex techniques, but rather to the disciplinary lore and taken for granted assumptions that students and faculty trained in discrete fields master informally and articulate effortlessly. As a remedy it suggests sharing accounts of disciplinary lore at the outset and across the breadth of collaborative work. As an illustration, it develops several historical narratives of collaborations between computer scientists and anthropologists, from cybernetics in the mid twentieth century to a twenty-first century project combining the explanatory theory of human behavioral ecology with human computer interaction.

House, K., Ziker, J., Fails, J., Wendell, M., & Boyer, J. (2025). Sharing Histories at the Intersection of Computer Science and Anthropology. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 199–215. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2575367

Can Environmental Engineering Save a World of Many Worlds? Anthropocene Curriculum for Engineers
Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Anindrya Nastiti & Gusmiati

This essay aims to craft the groundwork for re-engineering environmental engineering in/of the Anthropocene. Reflecting on experimental fieldwork in Muaragembong, Indonesia, raises the question of designing for water infrastructures for more-than-human beings and sets the stage for retracing the colonial origins and the postcolonial trajectory of environmental engineering in the postcolonial state. It concludes with a critical review of the current curriculum of environmental engineering at a technical university.

Prabaharyaka, I., Nastiti, A., & Gusmiati. (2025). Can Environmental Engineering Save a World of Many Worlds? Anthropocene Curriculum for Engineers. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 216–228. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2575445


Book review:
A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration
by Jane Calvert, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2023, 232 pp., $40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-262-54694-2
Caitlin D. Wylie

Wylie, C. D. (2025). A Place for Science and Technology Studies: Observation, Intervention, and Collaboration: by Jane Calvert, Cambridge, MA, The MIT Press, 2023, 232 pp., $40 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-262-54694-2. Engineering Studies, 17(3), 229–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/19378629.2025.2573892





Jessica M. Smith<https://www.jessicamsmith.net/>

Editor-in-chief, Engineering Studies<https://www.tandfonline.com/journals/test20>

Professor, Engineering, Design, and Society Department<https://www.mines.edu/eds/>

Colorado School of Mines


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