Selection and development of innovative design alternatives: Ethical, social and uncertainty issues

Abstract

Innovative engineering design shapes the development of novel technologies and is ethically as well as socially relevant, because it affects what kind of possibilities and consequences will arise. A major challenge in engineering design work on innovative technologies is the multitude of uncertainties in the form of known unknowns, unknown unknowns, complexities, and ambiguities. The evaluation and generation of design concepts are general and essential parts of the design process in which value-laden considerations play a role. In order to contribute to the adequate dealing with social and ethical issues in innovative engineering design practice, this study has focused on the selection of the ‘best’ design concept taking into account ethical and social issues in the early design stages and the development of ethically and socially acceptable design concepts which are ‘robust’ with respect to relevant uncertainties. In the current literature little to no attention has been given to the way ethical and social issues can be addressed in innovative engineering design, therefore, an exploratory research approach has been employed to investigate this unexplored area. In a critical methodological analysis on frequently applied selection tools, it was found that the information availability in innovative design is the main limitation for calculative decision making methods that aim to support judgement formation. The faced uncertainties in engineering design restrict the tools in such a way that they produce incoherent outcomes, if used to choose a winning design concept. In the subsequent exploratory ethnographic studies the practical application of these selection tools was investigated. The results show that the design engineers use decision tools to support their value-laden judgement formation, but that the tool does not prescribe or describe the selection, so avoiding the identified methodological limitations of this kind of tools. In order to consider value-laden design criteria in the evaluation process, design engineers would be assisted by clear performance measures. The results indicate that current index methods, like the Fire and Explosion Index, do not provide adequate measures that are directly applicable in the selection of the ‘best’ design concept. Still they provide a good starting point to build upon, if practical considerations of innovative engineering design are taken into account. In a critical literature study, it was investigated what kind of valued laden aspects play a role in the development of design alternatives in the innovative field of nanotechnology. This literature study grounds the investigation into the development of design concepts that are robust with respect to the uncertainties that surround innovative design work. It indicates that approaches for robust and innovative engineering design work require plasticity towards specific applications and time scales of possible effects. Subsequent exploratory ethical inquiry indicates that existing approaches to address social and ethical issues, such as the Twelve Principles of Green Chemistry, can be adapted to new and innovative areas of engineering by abstraction and successive tailoring to the specific application. Design engineers can further be supported in the development of robust designs by approaches that allow for the evaluation of moral acceptability of design concepts under uncertainty. In this thesis it is shown that the moral acceptability can be evaluated by conceptualising the application of the designed artefact as a social experiment that needs to meet four normative conditions (absence of alternatives, controllability, informed involvement, continuous re-evaluation), and that such an evaluation is fruitful for innovative engineering design. All in all, it is concluded that design engineers can deal with social and ethical issues under uncertainty that is typical of innovative design by forming design judgement with the help of proper selection tools and development approaches in order to design a robust artefact that is adaptable in its configuration, flexible in its functioning, resilient to design assumptions, and resistant to changing circumstances.