Despite increasing emphasis on understanding and developing ethical competence among engineering students, few studies portray how engineering undergraduates engage in ethical reasoning, particularly as it unfolds and shifts throughout the course of the design process. Even fewer have examined ethical reasoning when situated within authentic design contexts, particularly those in which students must navigate the messy interconnections between end-user needs, design constraints, team dynamics, technical problems, and ethical dilemmas. To prepare engineers capable of grappling with these ethical complexities, engineering educators need a richer understanding of students' situated, daily ethical decision-making. Drawing on a case study of 13 students in an undergraduate service learning engineering course, this study applies reflexive principlism as an analytical framework to explicate how students negotiate ethical decision-making throughout the course of the design process. In doing so, this project provides a rich description of students' ethical reasoning and its theoretical and practical implications for design. By tracing decision-making processes throughout the lifespan of design projects, it also provides a quasi-longitudinal examination of how design and ethical decision-making shifts throughout the course of the design process. Finally, this study offers an application of an emerging ethical decision-making framework, enabling educators to observe its principles in practice and apply these concepts in engineering ethics pedagogy.
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