Thinking about values in engineering

Engineering, it seems, has been in the public eye much more these days. Just look at the number of news items about climate change — or more recently the AI revolution and what it portends for society. Engineering wasn’t always this newsworthy unless there was some catastrophic event like the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion or a bridge failure that would suddenly thrust engineers into the spotlight.

The idea, of course, is for engineers to have done their due diligence and designed products and systems that reduce the risk of such catastrophic failures as best as possible. This is even more pressing when new technologies are in question.

To that end, I recently I had the chance to attend the fPET Conference (Forum on Philosophy, Engineering and Technology) held at the Technical University of Delft in the Netherlands. fPET brought together philosophers and engineers to examine the various ways that technology impacts human society and how best to address these issues.

Among the topics covered by presenters over the three-day conference were current issues such as climate change and the rapid development and deployment of AI. But the major theme was value change in engineering and design. Specifically, how values change with technological development and how these changes might impact design.

So, what exactly do we mean by values and value change? Here values are understood as beliefs about what is good or desirable, like human autonomy, safety, sustainability, or privacy. The further idea is that design is hardly ever value neutral, as many would claim or like to believe, but that every design embeds values within the designed artifact whether their designers are conscious of it or not. For example, sustainability was not always a relevant design value in energy technologies, but has emerged as one with the climate crisis and the realization that there are negative consequences to burning fossil fuels. Another example involves the development of wind turbines as sustainable alternative energy sources. While there are benefits from using wind to generate energy, an emerging body of evidence shows that they come with downsides for people living nearby such as noise that contributes to mental health issues, not to mention the damage to migrating bird populations that are well documented. And so, while wind turbines may satisfy one value (sustainability) they call for weighing one value against others (human health, ecological impacts).

What’s more, the values that become a part of design decisions early on have repercussions for political attitudes and judgements that may impact society more broadly and in unforeseen ways. At the same time, value changes can lead to a shift in preference for policies that focus on security or conformity or social stability.

This is why designers and engineers should take into consideration both existing values as well as emerging or changing values that technological innovation brings about and integrate them into the design process as necessary. There are a variety of existing approaches that aim to proactively address issues during a new technology’s early development and design phases. For example, the IEEE 7000 standard addresses ethical concerns during the system design phase by integrating human and social values into traditional systems engineering and design.

By paying attention to social and moral values throughout the entire design process, engineers can ensure that the technology they design truly serves the public interest. DW mbudimir@wtwhmedia.com