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

Ethical issues in engineering design
Above I have described the decision making process; I will now focus on the
argumentation used during the DutchEVO design process. During the design
process the initial requirements, decided on at the beginning of the process,
seemed to gain authority over time. It seemed requirements like lightweight and
fun-tot-drive were taken to be self-evident. According to the team, fun-to-drive
meant that a ride in the car should feel bumpy and exciting without leading to
bodily discomfort.
58
Pete: ‘I want a good contact with the car but without bruised buts or
headaches. A Spartan ride but no broken kidneys.’
If an option was considered to be fun-to-drive or just fun then that was an
argument to use that option in the design. It was not enough that an option was
fun, as can be seen in the following quote about the sunroof but it was regarded
as a strong argument for an option.
Dave: ‘Why should the car have a sun roof?’
Pete: ‘It is fun, the sun can come in.’
Michael: ‘To be able to transport a ..’
Thomas: ‘Fun is not enough.’
Another example of the importance given to designing a car that is fun-to-drive
is that the type of suspension chosen for the car was based on that used in the
old Mini Cooper, again because this was considered to be a fun-to-drive car. Even
in the choice of materials, fun was regarded a strong argument for using a
material.
Dave: ‘You can do much nicer things with composites; with glass fibre
you can do fun things.’
New team members accepted criteria like fun-to-drive and lightweight without a
lot of questions or critique. If new team members criticised these ideas they
were easily convinced by old team members to accept these ideas. As an example
of the authority that requirements gained over time, take the following. By the
time that I started following the project, about a year after the official start, it was
no longer possible to question the criteria lightweight and emotional
sustainability as measures of sustainability (for an explanation of emotional
sustainability see section 4.4). Even though there are contradictions between
sustainability as it is usually understood and what is meant by emotional
sustainability. Some project meetings were attended by people from outside the
project team. The question whether an electrical or hydrogen car would be more
sustainable was raised on some occasions. The answer was usually that