The rise of engineering ethics

The field of engineering ethics emerged in the mid 1970s, when humanists and social scientists joined engineers in addressing issues of moral and social responsibility in engineering. Funding from the National Science Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities supported collaborative projects to prepare engineers and philosophers to pursue research and teaching. The impetus from these projects and other efforts has yielded solid results in defining the subject matter and has led to a proliferation of courses outside of engineering programs. The prospects for progress in research and for the impact of teaching are good, but the institutionalization of engineering ethics in the engineering curriculum proceeds very slowly.     

Social Dimensions of Engineering Design: Observations from Mudd Design Workshop III

This paper reports on the Mudd Design Workshop III held at Harvey Mudd College (HMC) in May 2001 to provide a forum for engineers and social scientists acting as designers, researchers, and educators, to explore social and societal issues in and for engineering design education. Sessions were devoted to social and systems issues and themes in design; collaboration in design; and pedagogical and institutional issues in design education. Major emergent themes included the need for dialogue about the social dimensions of engineering design to extend across entire college and university faculties, the use of design to enhance the study of values and ethics in undergraduate curricula, the importance of the framing of design problems, and the pedagogical choices made in design courses. Before leaving, participants made commitments to work toward change at least in their own environments.     

Ethics,society, and technology: A Confucian role ethics perspective

This essay provides a very brief overview of Confucian ethics that focuses on the role-based morality. It compares Confucian ethics with two dominant schools of thought in Western ethics deontology and consequentialism. This essay then discusses how Confucian ethics provides a unique way to think about social and political issues such as how the political leaders are selected and evaluated, the ethical justification of political legitimacy, the prioritization of economic, social, and cultural rights over other rights, and moral egalitarianism. Finally, this essay explores the ways in which Confucian ethics serves as a useful intellectual resource for examining the issues arising from the ethical assessment of (emerging) technologies and the professional formation of engineers. The Appendix of this essay includes some teaching resources that instructors can employ to teach students about ethics, society, and technology from a Confucian role ethics perspective.     

Ethics and the Development of Professional Identities of Engineering Students

How do undergraduate students in engineering conceive of themselves as professionals? How can a course on engineering ethics affect the development of an undergraduate student's professional identity? In this project, students responded to questions about the characteristics and responsibilities of professional engineers. The results indicate that students learn about professionalism primarily from relatives and co‐workers who are engineers, and rarely from technical engineering courses. Even before they study engineering ethics, students put honesty and integrity on par with technical competence as an essential characteristic of engineers. In the course, students benefit from cases of actual incidents and from classroom activities that encourage diverse perspectives on moral problems. By analyzing cases in groups and by hearing different perspectives, students build self‐confidence in moral reasoning. By the end of the course, some students understand professional responsibility not only as liability for blame but in a capacious sense as stewardship for society.     

Sustainable development, engineering education and activity

This paper is concerned principally with a view of engineering, engineering education and sustainable activity in the United Kingdom. It presents a synoptic review of current environmental issues and the response of the engineering profession in its widest sense. It highlights the tentative impetus for `greening' undergraduate curricula and the response by industry to environmental issues. The importance of engineers adopting a high profile in public affairs to convey concern and commitment to sustainable development is stressed. It calls for opportunities in engineering education for the synthesis of rational and intuitive thinking in solving problems     

Engineering Ethics: What? Why? How? And When?

Engineering ethics is professional ethics, as opposed to personal morality. It sets the standards for professional practice, and is only learned in a professional school or in professional practice. It is an essential part of professional education because it helps students deal with issues they will face in professional practice. The best way to teach engineering ethics is by using cases—not just the disaster cases that make the news, but the kinds of cases that an engineer is more likely to encounter. Many cases are available, and there are methods for analyzing them. Engineering ethics can be taught in a free-standing course, but there are strong arguments for introducing ethics in technical courses as well. Engineering is something that engineers do, and what they do has profound effects on others. If the subject of professional ethics is how members of a profession should, or should not, affect others in the course of practicing their profession, then engineering ethics is an essential aspect of engineering itself and education in professional responsibilities should be part of professional education in engineering, just as it is in law and medicine. Probably few engineering educators would disagree with these claims; their implementation in engineering education is another matter. We want to discuss the introduction of engineering ethics into engineering education in terms of four questions: What is engineering ethics? Why should it be emphasized in engineering education? How should it be taught? and When should it appear in the student's education?     

现代会展空间导视系统的色彩设计探析

基于现代会展空间的环境属性及特点,就目前会展导视系统中存在的色彩问题进行总结,并结合从影响色彩设计的人、环境背景、文化及载体因素方面出发,分析了在会展导视系统的色彩设计时应注意的问题。并论述了适用于目前色彩设计的通用、醒目、系统和艺术性四项构建原则,力图为人们创造出一个引导清晰、系统、便利的现代会展空间环境提供理论依据。     

Engaging and Supporting Problem Solving in Engineering Ethics

Learning to solve ethical problems is essential to the education of all engineers. Engineering ethics problems are complex and ill structured with multiple perspectives and interpretations to address in their solution. In two experiments, we examined alternative strategies for engaging ethical problem solving. In Experiment 1, students studied two versions of an online learning environment consisting of everyday ethics problems. Students using question hypertext links to navigate applied more perspectives and canons and wrote stronger overall solutions to ethics problems than those using embedded hypertext links. In Experiment 2, students engaged in a more generative task, evaluating alternative arguments for solutions to the cases or generating and supporting their own solutions. Both groups better supported their solutions and generated more counterclaims than control students. These studies focused on solving realistic case‐based ethics problems as an effective method for addressing ABET's ethics criteria.     

Book reviews

Social and environmental problems go hand- in-hand, yet assessment of developments tends to consider them in isolation if at all. This study highlights the environmental and social problems in a small community in northern Senegal, and seeks ways of providing sustainable solutions. In this agricultural project, environmental problems are relatively simple to identify; social issues are more difficult. The problems highlighted relate to land tenure issues and irrigation mismanagement: a solution can only be sustainable, if identified and implemented by the local community. A Geographical Information System is suggested as a tool for facilitating community-led improvements.     

Solvent selection guide: a guide to the integration of environmental, health and safety criteria into the selection of solvents

 A practical, easy to use Solvent Selection Guide has been developed to provide a concise source of selected information and guidance to chemists and engineers to assist with their selection of solvents. It provides a relative ranking, and is limited by design to the inherent environmental, health and safety issues, in combination with general and specific process and facility issues associated with each solvent. These represent areas that are not always considered by R&D chemists and engineers during normal product or process development. The guide is intended to augment existing processes that mostly consider only technical, cost and regulatory aspects so that chemists and engineers may make more broadly considered solvent selections early in the chemical development process. The Guide currently includes a total of 35 solvents which were most commonly used in SmithKline Beecham (SB) Research and Development and manufacturing activities over the past three years, although the methodology used to develop the guide is readily applicable to other solvents. Detailed guidance is provided in a manual, and is summarized within charts which relatively rank and identify solvents and key issue areas, provide information on the new International Conference on Harmonization (ICH) guidelines for residual solvents in final pharmaceutical products, and supply data for co-solvent selection. The latter chart enables a chemist or engineer to choose solvents based on the ease of separation, which maximizes solvent utilization, recovery, and re-use. There is also a summary sheet for each solvent which reviews the scores and major issues for all the key categories used to develop the Environment & Safety Guide and provides essential solvent property data. Received: 5 November 1998 / Accepted: 11 February 1999     

开展工程伦理学研究 增强工程师责任意识

工程伦理学是20世纪后期兴起的一门交叉学科。文章首先分析了把技术开发与技术使用分开，从而回避工程师责任的做法，进而剖析了认为工程是科学的应用和工程是实现社会价值的简单工具等观点，指出工程与伦理密切相关，工程师应当增强责任意识。     

设计伦理视域下的共享快递包装设计

目的 以日益增长的环境污染和资源浪费问题为切入点,从设计伦理学的角度对共享快递包装进行设计研究。方法 分析共享快递包装现阶段所存在的伦理问题,通过实地调研和用户访谈,探讨用户对共享快递包装的设计诉求,深入研究寄取件操作难、部分弱势群体出行不便、货品过重不易运输、包装物回收难度大等快递包装使用过程中所出现的一系列问题,尝试提出以快递包装箱为载体,实现共享快递租赁服务的系统解决方案。结论 新型共享包装设计从材料选择、功能设计、结构设计再到回收体系,都应遵循生态性、共享性、人性化的设计伦理原则,能够有效解决包装成本高、回收困难、资源浪费、服务体系不健全等问题。并且依靠互联网、大数据等技术搭建快递共享平台,提出伦理价值实现路径,保证共享快递包装系统的精准高效施行。     

Ethics and the biomedical engineer

As we enter the new millennium, it seems appropriate to consider the future of engineering and education. This paper focuses on the need to incorporate ethics into everyday practice for all engineers, using biomedical engineering as an example throughout. The authors make the case that engineers need to be introduced to ethics from day one of their lifelong learning     

Assessment of an Engineering Ethics Video: Incident at Morales

A new engineering ethics video, Incident at Morales, was assessed with two different instruments: the standard Defining Issues Test and a short ad hoc survey. According to pre‐tests and post‐tests with the Defining Issues Test, viewers of the video increased the sophistication of their moral reasoning skills. According to the survey, viewers changed their opinions about the most important responsibilities of engineers and about meeting environmental regulations when working overseas. From these results, it appears that the video is an effective approach to teach engineering ethics.     

Environmental assessment in Singapore: an enigma wrapped up in a mystery!

This paper reviews the status of the environmental assessment (EA) system in Singapore and attempts to evaluate the potential for adoption of strategic environmental assessment (SEA). In Singapore, the colonial legacy of the planning system has resulted in similar processes being adopted to the British planning system and similar resistance to that previously experienced in the UK towards EA. This research indicates that the benefits of EA are not being achieved and that the demise of the natural environment in Singapore is being severely affected as a result. The terminology of SEA is not recognised, although it is claimed that environmental considerations are included in the sophisticated concept planning system that follows a ten-year cycle. Evidence collected suggests that other considerations perceived to be more important relating to economic, technical and social issues far outweighany emphasis on the environment.     

Impact assessment: tiering approaches for sustainable development planning and decision-making of a large infrastructure project

ABSTRACT

The objective of this paper is to analyze a tiering scoping approach developed to identify critical multidimensional sustainability issues and impacts of a large infrastructure project: the land transport project linking northern Brazil with a new port on Guyana’s coast. The Inter-American Development Bank awarded a technical assignment to develop the terms of reference of a country environmental assessment, a strategic environmental and social assessment and an environmental and social impact assessment of the project(s). The complexity of the issues at stake lead to the design of a tiered assessment process supported by wide-ranging participative sessions involving 170 individuals from Guyana and Brazil and from diverse sectors. The process identified ex ante conditionalities, critical factors for decision-making and valued socioenvironmental and governance components. Such complex and determinant planning initiatives for the future of a country need to be supported by comprehensive, well-sequenced scoping processes.     

The ethical issues of social assistive robotics: A critical literature review

Along with its potential contributions to the practice of care, social assistive robotics raises significant ethical issues. The growing development of this technoscientific field of intelligent robotics has thus triggered a widespread proliferation of ethical attention towards its disruptive potential. However, the current landscape of ethical debate is fragmented and conceptually disordered, endangering ethics’ practical strength for normatively addressing these challenges. This paper presents a critical literature review of the ethical issues of social assistive robotics, which provides a comprehensive and intelligible overview of the current ethical approach to this technoscientific field. On the one hand, ethical issues have been identified, quantitatively analyzed and categorized in three main thematic groups. Namely: Well-being, Care, and Justice. On the other hand –and on the basis of some significant disclosed tendencies of the current approach–, future lines of research and issues regarding the enrichment of the ethical gaze on social assistive robotics have been identified and outlined.     

Dynamics of environmental problems in Mumbai

This paper presents the dynamics of environmental problems in Mumbai city. An evolution concept is applied to study the present environmental status of Mumbai. In order to study its dynamics, the entire process of environmental evolution is divided into four types viz. poverty-related environmental issues, industrialization- and urbanization-related environmental issues, rapid economic growth-related environmental issues and wealthy lifestyle-related environmental issues. Dynamics of suitable indicators for all the above issues over the economic development has been studied. Temporal representation of respective indicator for each type of the environmental problem presented the distribution of these types of environmental problems on a longitudinal scale. In the analysis it is found that, at present Mumbai has prevalence to rapid economic development-related environmental problems. Poverty-related environmental issues show very little significance. Industrialization- and urban-related environmental issues coexist with rapid economic development-related environmental issues. This provides the necessary inputs to city planner so as to avoid various environmental costs that other cities have already experienced.

---

Managing information for concurrent engineering: Challenges and barriers

An ongoing research project with a large international manufacturing company has uncovered many critical issues for the development and introduction of systems that supportconcurrent engineering. Several of these issues can be solved through careful interface design, while others require significant technical and organizational changes. To reduce training costs and support a broad spectrum of users, computer system developers must create a single system image, giving the users the impression that they are accessing a single database through a consistent and easy to use interface. This interface, and the tools it contains, may be used to support concurrent engineering activities even when a company is geographically distributed over a large area. The complexity of the firm's products and processes and the need for rapid access to relevant performance information make it essential that developers identify suitable frameworks for organizing database queries.Design hierarchies, representations of the structure and function of the firm's products and processes, have proven to be powerful tools for effective query management, and for efficient navigation through the database. The database interface must also produce integrated displays of data drawn from a number of sources in response to prestructured queries. Beyond these interface design issues, there are a number of technical and organizational barriers to the implementation of large-scale engineering systems. In particular, the existence of many incompatible databases in different parts of an organization makes the introduction of a new, uniform system very difficult. Organizational issues also play a major role in achieving, or hindering, the implementation of new computer systems. This paper describes some of the technical innovations, and the motivations behind them, from one particular engineering design system. It also discusses the reactions of engineers and management, and explains why management may oppose innovation even when engineers enthusiastically support it.