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

Engineering ethics and design processes
With regard to active responsibility, the problem of many hands can be seen
when no one feels or thinks that he or she is responsible for certain issues. If
issues are not specifically part of someone’s task description, everyone can avoid
taking responsibility for them. These issues may then be neglected in the design
process.
In a paper on the relationship between how companies are organised and harm
they cause other people, Darley studied a case of the design and testing of landing
gear for a military aircraft that failed during landing after test flights [Darley,
1996]. People in the company knew that there were calculation errors and
because of these errors there was a large chance the landing gear would fail.
Certain social mechanisms made the people in the organisation actively conceal
the calculation errors for their customers and tinker with data in certifying
documents. In this case people felt either forced by their superiors or felt they
were already too involved and caught up with the tinkering of the data to stop the
concealing of calculation errors.
Darley also points to the way a decision is framed. Stopping a production
process or changing a design requires action, while going on is often seen as not
requiring action. Action has to be defended to other people while in the case of
doing or changing nothing, such defence is not required. Action is only taken
when there is proof of harm. This frames the decision in an “innocent until
proven guilty” way. This is different from using a precautionary frame for the
decision, where no harm has to be proven. A suspicion of harm can be enough to
warrant acting against it. Framing a similar decision differently can lead to
different actions [Darley, 1996]. This might be relevant for design processes,
especially when decisions have to be made to stop or go on with a design process.
The aspects of design processes mentioned above are all relevant from an ethical
point of view and therefore they were included in the conception of design
processes used in this thesis. In view of the foregoing, I regard design processes
as organised social processes which aim at solving more or less ill-structured design
problems in this work. All of these aspects mentioned above were used to support
data-collection in the case-studies. For example, in the case-studies attention was
paid to the organisation of the design team and the social processes within the
design team because this helped me to determine who was involved in what
decisions when dealing with ethical issues.
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