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By investigating the social and environmental politics that are embodied in service robots, I show how both the laboratory culture and wider society expect their own respective values and environmental cultures to displace the other. This dissertation highlights the importance of understanding how robotics laboratories and larger society mutually transform each other, using a framework I call Laboratorization of Everyday Life. I analyze how the development of robotics involves a mutual transformation of the robot, the laboratory, and particular values and norms involving education, gender, class, body image, and living spaces in the society the laboratory is embedded within. Actors in laboratories are not hermetically sealed, but fully part of society. Similarly, actors in society change their everyday environments to better conform to laboratory settings, in order to make the wider world "useful" for technological innovation. People living in modern society are actually living in a semi-laboratory, which is embedded within the robot's technological default settings regarding values and environment, which are selected by the laboratory's engineers and designers. By conducting trial and error in everyday life, robot users have agency to re-mold service robots and norms built into their design and technological capacities. That is, the users are also able to rebuild and reinterpret values and environmental cultures inside their service robots. Ultimately, my dissertation offers a potential perspective on how robotics laboratories and larger society work together through robots to open lines of trustful communication between scientific, social, and political communities. Doctor of Philosophy Using a robot in everyday life requires many things, including lighting, sounds, noise, room temperature, knowledge, proper usage, and expectations about the robot. Since a robot is a creation of the laboratory, roboticists bake assumptions, such as environmental settings, gender bias, racism, norms, and values, into the robot. When users use the robot in their everyday life, they have to modify their everyday environments, understandings, concepts, and values to fit with the assumptions already in it. Hence, roboticists, users, and the robot transform everyday life into a semi-laboratory: a society that embodies the selected assumptions from the robotics laboratory. In order to examine this phenomenon, I propose a framework I call the "Laboratorization of Everyday Life". I analyze how the development of robotics involves a mutual transformation of the robot, the laboratory, and particular values and norms involving education, gender, class, body image, and living spaces in the society the robot is embedded within. Actors in laboratories are not hermetically sealed off, but fully part of society. I argue that people living in modern society are actually living in a semi-laboratory, which is embedded within the robot's technological default settings regarding social values and environment, which are selected by the laboratory's engineers and designers. Although modern society is embedded within the selected values from the laboratory, people still have agency to accept, modify, rewrite, and reject the assumptions coming with the robot. By conducting trial and error in everyday life, users have agency to re-mold robots and norms built into their design and technological capacities. That is, the users are also able to rebuild and reinterpret values and environmental cultures inside their robots. This framework shows how robotics laboratories and larger society work together through robots to open lines of communication between scientific, social, and political communities.

This thesis examines the growth of the space elevator community in America from 1975 to 2010. It argues that the continued practical failures of the space elevator, a proposed technology for efficiently transporting payloads and people into space without conventional propulsion sources, resulted from a technological paradigm built around the rocket and supported by a traditional engineering culture. After its triumph in landing men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972, the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sought to advance novel concepts for further space exploration, but it fumbled in pursuing nontraditional notions of escaping the atmosphere such as the space elevator. Employing interviews with space elevator advocates Bradley Edwards and Michael Laine and other primary and secondary sources, this thesis also draws on concepts such as technological paradigms, engineering cultures, and the technological sublime. It concludes by demonstrating how success eluded the marginalized space elevator researchers who found themselves grappling with the vast social and technical system that supported the rocket's hegemony. Master of Arts This thesis examines the growth of the space elevator community in America from 1975 to 2010. It argues that the continued practical failures of the space elevator, a proposed technology for efficiently transporting payloads and people into space without conventional propulsion sources, resulted from a technological paradigm built around the rocket and supported by a traditional engineering culture. The technological paradigm of the rocket encompassed all of the people and practices that made the rocket work. After its triumph in landing men on the Moon from 1969 to 1972, the United States' National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) sought to advance novel concepts for further space exploration, but it fumbled in pursuing nontraditional notions of escaping the atmosphere such as the space elevator. Much of this failure is owed to an engineering culture within NASA that looked down upon challenging the rocket. This thesis demonstrates how success eluded the marginalized space elevator researchers who found themselves grappling with the vast social and technical system that supported the rocket's hegemony.

Reports that call for change in engineering education date back to the Mann report (1918), but more recent reports like "The Engineer of 2020" (NAE, 2004), and "Lean Engineering Education," (Flumerfelt et al., 2015) describe the need for engineers who are creative leaders, who have sustainability and ethics skills. Two narrative threads emerge from these reports: that engineering education does not adequately prepare engineers with the skills needed for industry, and that preparation for industry is imperative in order to address problems in society. However, these threads conflict with research from engineering education, science and technology studies, and higher education. There may not be a gap between school and work (Modestino, Shoag and Balance, 2016), and if there is one, it might be a socio-cultural gap that is unreasonable for universities to accept the full responsibility of narrowing. More problematic is that establishing "preparation-for-work" as the purpose for education threatens the goal of preparing students for life outside of work and does not necessarily prepare them to act towards benefit for society. The goal of this study was to critique these narratives using narratives of newcomer engineers' lived experiences. I had two research questions: 1) Who are new engineers asked to be at work? 2) Who do new engineers choose to be in response? I answered these by constructing and analyzing narratives of 12 newcomer engineers, based on interviews collected as part of the Capstone to Work study (Paretti et al., 2021). Using the figured worlds framework of identity development (Holland et al., 1998), I investigated the structures of work, which constrained who newcomers could become, and newcomers' agency, which they used to improvise identities within those constraints. The structures of engineering work that I examined required newcomers to acclimate to ongoing practices at their companies, which did not conform to newcomers' expectations of creative engineering work. Newcomers were objectified: their value and identity was often defined in terms of how much money they made for their company. They were alienated: their engineering problems were rarely defined in terms of their societal impact. The faced sexism: they were denied respectable identities based on gender. In response, some newcomers sought the identity of "asset" for their companies. Other newcomers sought new jobs that would give them opportunities for creativity, growth or societal benefit. And some newcomers worked to create opportunities at their jobs to be who they wanted: leaders, engineers working for environmental benefit, whole persons outside and inside of work. The results of this study suggest limitations of preparation narratives: They do not account for objectification, alienation, and sexism that newcomers face. Engineers also may unfortunately be prepared with stereotypes that do not match the realities of engineering work. This study suggests that we need to educate engineers in a way that recognizes them as human and prepares them for these realities. It also shows us that socio-technical change requires change at the structural level and cannot be limited to changes in education. Doctor of Philosophy Reports like "The Engineer of 2020", and "Lean Engineering Education," describe the need for engineers who are creative leaders, and who have sustainability and ethics skills. Engineering education researchers and practitioners use these preparation narratives to justify their funding to grant-awarding institutions, to develop research agendas, and to align their education efforts with these national calls. Two threads emerge from typical preparation narratives: that engineering education does not adequately prepare engineers with the skills needed for industry, and that preparation for industry is necessary for engineering to address societal problems. These, however, conflict with research from engineering education, science and technology studies, and higher education. If there is a gap between school and work, it might be a socio-cultural gap that is unreasonable for universities to accept the full responsibility of narrowing. More problematic is that establishing "preparation-for-work" as the primary purpose of education threatens the goal of preparing students for life outside of work and does not necessarily prepare them to act towards benefit for society. This study critiques these narratives by referring to newcomer engineers' lived experiences and identity development. I had two research questions: 1) Who are new engineers asked to be at work? 2) Who do new engineers choose to be in response? I answered these by constructing and analyzing narratives of 12 newcomer engineers, based on interviews collected as part of the Capstone to Work study. Using the figured worlds framework of identity development, I investigated the structures of work, which constrained who newcomers could become, and newcomers' agency in becoming different kinds of engineers within those constraints. Newcomers were generally required to acclimate to ongoing practices at their companies, which did not conform to their expectations of creative engineering work. Newcomers were objectified: their value and identity was often defined in terms of how much money they made for their company. They were alienated: their engineering problems were rarely defined in terms of their societal impact. The faced sexism: they were denied respectable identities based on gender. In response, some newcomers sought the identity of "asset" for their companies. Other newcomers sought new jobs that would give them opportunities for creativity, growth or societal benefit. And some newcomers worked to create opportunities at their jobs to be who they wanted. The results of this study suggest limitations of preparation narratives: they do not account for objectification, alienation, and sexism that newcomers face. Engineers also may unfortunately be prepared with stereotypes that do not match the realities of engineering work. Engineers should be educated in a way that recognizes them as human and prepares them for the realities of work. The study also confirms that efforts for socio-technical change cannot be limited to educational changes, because of structural constraints.

Large, ever more complex, technological systems surround us and provide products and services that both construct and define much of what we consider as modern society. Our societal bargain is the trade-off between the benefits of our technologies and our constant vigilance over the safe workings and the occasional failures of these often hazardous sociotechnical systems during their operating life. Failure of a system's infrastructure, whether a complex subsystem or a single component, can cause planes to crash, oil rigs to burn, or the release of radioactivity from a nuclear power plant. To prevent catastrophes, much depends not only on skilled and safe operations, but upon the effective maintenance of these systems. Using the commercial nuclear power industry, of the United States, as a case study, this dissertation examines how nuclear power plant maintenance functions to ensure the plants are reliable and can safely operate for, potentially, eighty years; the current, government regulation defined limit, of their functional life. This study explores the history of U.S. nuclear maintenance regulatory policy from its early Cold War political precursors, the effect of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor melt-down accident, through its long development, and finally its implementation by nuclear power licensees as formal maintenance programs. By investigating the maintenance of nuclear power plants this research also intends to expand the conceptual framework of large- technological-system (LTS) theory, in general, by adding a recognizable, and practically achievable, end-of-life (EOL) phase to the heuristic structure. The dissertation argues that maintenance is a knowledge producing technology that not only keeps a sociotechnical system operating through comprehension, but can be a surveillance instrument to make system end-of-life legible; that is both visible and understandable. With a discernible and legible view of system end-of-life, operators, policy makers, and the public can make more informed decisions concerning a system's safety and its continued usefulness in society. Doctor of Philosophy Large, ever more complicated, technical systems surround us and provide products and services that define much of what we consider as modern society. Our societal bargain is the trade-off between the benefits of our technologies and our constant vigilance over the safe workings and the occasional failures of these often hazardous systems during their operating life. Failure of a system's infrastructure, whether a complex subsystem or a single component, can cause planes to crash, oil rigs to burn, or the release of radioactivity from a nuclear power plant. To prevent catastrophes, much depends not only on skilled and safe operations, but upon the effective maintenance of these systems. Using the commercial nuclear power industry, of the United States, as a case study, this dissertation examines how nuclear power plant maintenance functions to ensure the plants are reliable and can safely operate for, potentially, eighty years; the current, government regulation defined limit, of their functional life. This study explores the history of U.S. nuclear maintenance regulatory policy from its early Cold War political precursors, the effect of the 1979 Three Mile Island reactor melt-down accident, through its long development, and finally its implementation by nuclear power licensees as formal maintenance programs. By investigating the maintenance of nuclear power plants this research also intends to develop a method to determine when a nuclear power plant, or other large technological system, is approaching or has reached the end of its reliable and safe operational life. The dissertation presents maintenance as a technology of knowledge that not only keeps a system operating through understanding of its components, but can be a general surveillance instrument to make system end-of- life legible. With a discernible and understandable view of end-of-life, operators, policy makers, and the public can make more informed decisions concerning a system's safety and its continued usefulness to society.