Ethical issues in engineering design - 3TU.Centre for Ethics and ...

Ethical issues in engineering design
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customer, so that he understands that we will only make a sketchy
model. If he wants us to calculate the dimensions more precisely, he
will need a new more refined model.’
Hans asks Liz what he is responsible for: ‘You are responsible for the
strength calculations, I only calculate the stiffnesses?’
Liz: ‘I think that this is really a part of reporting to the customer.'
When the engineers were working together and trying to decide what to do
and what option would “work” a number of different ways were used to reach a
decision. Liz and Hans and the other engineers that were sometimes involved
tried to convince each other. They tried to reach a kind of consensus, although
they did not always do this explicitly. Sometimes there was no separate step of
convincing the other(s) because the scenario was sketched as a team. This
occurred, for example when Liz and Hans were looking at the finite element
model and were thinking about changing the thickness of some materials and
what the influence would be on the total deformation of the trailer under a
certain load. There were also situations in which one of the engineers had
already made a scenario or had an idea about what to do. Usually this engineer
tried to convince the other(s) that his or her idea was sound. The other engineers
could be convinced or they could disagree. If agreement was reached discussion
on the topic was only started again when new information made this necessary.
If there was still disagreement then the one responsible for the decision decided
what was to be done, in this case Liz. The other engineer(s) could then close the
discussion with words like “We will see what happens”. The discussion on the
topic was not closed if disagreement remained even though a decision had been
made. The discussion could be started again at any time.
In another project performed simultaneously with this trailer design process
at the engineering company, I observed that there was another way of making
decisions if tasks were divided in a way that every engineer was responsible for
certain parts of the design. The one who was responsible for designing a part
decided. This could make discussion on the contents of decisions superfluous,
but was not necessarily so. The engineers liked to test their ideas against
colleagues, so an engineer might start a discussion on a topic he or she was
responsible for.
When there was a meeting between the engineering company and the
customer, they chose to sit on opposite sites of the table, engineers from the
engineering company on one side and the customer and his advising engineer
on the other side. In such meetings the CLC engineers all seemed to defend one
idea, there seemed to be no disagreement among the CLC engineers. During