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

Ethical issues in engineering design
operationalisation. The first efforts to operationalise sustainability were made by
Dave at the beginning of the project. The operationalisation continued to evolve
during the design process. In design meetings design team members discussed
ethical issues that might not be so relevant to the part that they designed but that
were relevant for other members of the team.
In making decisions on ethical issues the personal experience of design team
members played a large part. The idea that people will drive more carefully if
they feel vulnerable and that therefore the car should make people feel
vulnerable was based on the personal experience of the design team members.
They could have found theories to support their ideas in the literature. There is,
for example a theory called target risk theory within traffic psychology that states
that a driver will keep the perceived risk in line with his or her target risk [Wilde,
1994]. This theory implies that if a car feels safer, a driver will drive more
dangerously or that if roads are illuminated at night, drivers will drive faster.
This target risk theory has been heavily debated within traffic psychology. There
is empirical evidence that supports the hypothesis and empirical evidence that
seems to falsify it [Rothengatter, 2002]. In the DutchEVO case the engineers did
not really know what the effect will be of the driver feeling vulnerable. They
could have known more about this issue if they had done some research into the
literature on traffic psychology, but this literature is not conclusive. So it is very
difficult to say what the effect will be of people feeling vulnerable in their car
instead of feeling protected by their car on, for example, the amount of traffic
deaths. Yet based on personal experience the design team decided that a safe car
is a car in which the driver feels a bit vulnerable.
During the design process ideas, especially those concerning a sustainable
car being a lightweight car, seemed to become self-evident for the design team
and to increase in importance. After a while the lightweight criterion as a
measure for sustainability ceased to be discussed. This self-evidence prevented
discussions on some possible contradictions in the team’s ideas of sustainability.
The design team started with the idea of a sustainable product, yet questions can
be raised as to whether a fun city car can be really sustainable.
4.6.3 Regulative framework
The complete system of legislation, regulations, technical codes and crash tests
constitute a regulative framework. With regard to car safety the tests performed
by EuroNCAP are an important element of the regulative framework. The
regulative framework was only partly used in the DutchEVO design because the
mass of the car was given high priority. The operationalisation of car safety that
was available in the existing regulative framework leads to heavy and stiff cars.
The DucthEVO design team could not, and did not want to, use this
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