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

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DutchEVO, safe or sustainable? Emotional sustainability should lead to a strong bond between car and driver. It should be possible to personalise the car and the car should age beautifully. One phrase that was often repeated is that it should be a pleasure to age with the car. People should like the car so much that they will not discard it before it brakes down. According to some design team members this would mean that less new cars are sold and that would be more sustainable because less scarce raw materials would be used to produce the cars. Supervisor of a student: ‘What do you mean by sustainability?’ Dave: ‘That it does not conflict with the interests of future generations. So that can be energy use or wastes.’ Thomas: ‘It can also be that if you ride two years longer with your car before you buy a new one that is also a contribution to sustainability.’ Dave: ‘This is not valid for 10 years.’ With his remark Dave pointed to the fact that as engines age they become more polluting and also engine technology will improve. Driving a car that is old can therefore at one point become more polluting and energy consuming than recycling that old car and producing a new one. Students designing parts of the DutchEVO tried to use the ideas on technological and emotional sustainability in their designs. With regard to technological sustainability this was relatively easy because this was operationalised as lightweight. Yet, it must be said that for some students, especially two students from HTS Autotechniek, technological as well as emotional, sustainability were difficult concepts. They were seen as typical DutchEVO words but what they referred to, the students did not know exactly. The Dutch word for sustainability is often interpreted as durability, this causes confusion. Jill: ‘Oh that word sustainable that is really a disaster. It is a disaster word…..[explanation of what she thinks sustainable means] ….But it is really a DutchEVO buzz word, I must say.’ So some students in the design team, who sometimes used the term sustainability, did not really understand what was meant by it. 69
Ethical issues in engineering design 4.5 Sustainable and / or safe Safety and sustainability are values that are difficult to combine in a car. Depending on the operationalisation of both safety and sustainability it can even be impossible to design a car that is both optimally safe and sustainable. In the DutchEVO project the lightweight criterion was regarded as the most important part of the operationalisation of sustainability. This had a negative influence on the safety of the people inside the car. A light car will always experience the larger acceleration in a crash with a heavier car. In a car with a mass of 400 kg it is also very difficult to include all kinds of active safety systems. Active safety systems like ABS and Electronic Stability Program (ESP) require a lot of electrical devices and hydraulical pumps, and above the mass added by including these active safety systems these safety systems consume energy in use. In discussions within the design team on including safety systems, the argument that the systems would increase the mass was deemed very important. The trade-offs that needed to be made between safety and sustainability (mass) triggered a change in the operationalisation of safety. Some of the design team members thought that mass should be a decisive argument. In most instances of trade-offs between safety and sustainability, sustainability or at least mass got the highest priority. During the design process it became apparent that it was not possible to include all kinds of safety systems and still design a car of 400 kg. First the criterion for safety was complying with relevant legislation and performing well in crash tests (see for example the requirements in section 4.1). Later in the design process safety became something like: as safe as the car can be weighing no more than 400 kg combined with making the driver feel a bit vulnerable. Instead of including all kinds of systems and devices the team wanted to make the driver feel a bit vulnerable and responsible, thereby promoting safe driving. A goal of the project became to challenge the existing way of designing safe cars in which more systems and heavier cars are deemed safer. Because it was not possible to use the operationalisation of car safety that car industry uses nowadays and still design a car of 400 kg, the DutchEVO design team was forced to think about the operationalisation of car safety. If the DutchEVO design team had not set the requirement of a maximum mass of 400 kg they probably would not have had to think about and discuss about car safety. They could just have included all systems that the price of the car would allow. 4.6 Summary of the case and the regulative framework Although cars have existed for over a century, it can be concluded that DutchEVO was a radical design process. It was radical in the functional way (see 70
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Contents 1 Introduction 9 1.1 Resea
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Contents 7.3 Safe in what sense? 13
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9 Towards warranted trust in engine
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Towards warranted trust in engineer
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Samenvatting Ethische aspecten in o
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Samenvatting 1a. De soort ethische
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Samenvatting Sommige details worden
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Samenvatting zelf waardevol vinden
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Appendix 2 Members of the DutchEVO
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Appendix 2 Ryan: Industrial designe
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Curriculum Vitae Anke van Gorp was
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Simon Stevin Series in the Philosop
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