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

Design of a bridge
Completion: The engineering design company controls whether the building
contractor has built an object that satisfies the requirements. Advice is given on
payments.
The preliminary design phase started in January 2004 and was finished by the
end of April 2004. The phase resulted in a preliminary design report for the
customer. During the preliminary design phase I attended the technical meetings
and I interviewed five engineers and the architect working on the project. I will
explain more about the context of the design process in the next section, there the
stakeholders and the customer will be described.
The bridge should be constructed and be ready for use in 2007. A document
with the design requirements had already been written during the research phase
before the preliminary design phase. The IBA had participated in the research
phase and the writing of the requirements. Other stakeholders involved in the
research phase were the architect and the DRO, the municipal organisation for
planning and urbanism. The preliminary design of this bridge is high to middle
level design, it is somewhat lower in design hierarchy than the conceptual design
of the bridge but it is the first effort to make a design of the construction of the
bridge based on the architect’s drawings of the desired shape of the bridge.
Designing this bridge is a normal design process. In this regard the bridge is
just another arched bridge although it is a rather large one. The working
principle, how arched bridges work, and normal configuration, what they look
like, are well known. The architect tried to make the working principle of the
arched bridge visible in its shape. In an arched bridge there are either strong and
heavy arches to support the mass or there are two strong beams at either side of
the bridge deck that carry most of the loads. In this case the architect had chosen
to use heavy arches. In short the design problem is: build a beautiful arched
bridge that is not too expensive and that does not hinder ships during
construction or while in use. Take all legislation into account and take care that
no one gets injured or killed during construction.
The difficulty in this design process is not in designing a new working
principle or a new configuration; it is in combining and meeting all
requirements, in the coordination of all the different tasks and in maintaining the
communication between all the stakeholders. A lot of stakeholders are involved:
among others two municipalities, a power station, an architect, the municipal
service for urban development, and the Rijkswaterstaat. 2 All these stakeholders
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2 The design process is at the time not finished. After the preliminary design phase the design
process was temporarily stopped. There were some financial problems concerning IJburg and
the customer needed to deal with them. The customer probably also needs to get the
permission of the Amsterdam city council to expand the budget for the bridge.
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