What is Societal Consideration in Engineering Design ?

The first fundamental canon of the ABET Code of Ethics states that “engineers shall hold paramount the safety, health, and welfare of the public in the performance of their profession.” A similar statement has been in engineering codes of ethics since the early 1920s, yet there is no question that what society perceives to be proper treatment by the profession has changed greatly in the intervening time. Today’s mass communications make the general public, in a matter of hours, aware of events taking place anywhere in the world. That, coupled with a generally much higher standard of education and standard of living, has led to the development of a society that has high expectations, reacts to achieve change, and organizes to protest perceived wrongs. At the same time, technology has had major effects on the everyday life of the average 

citizen. Whether we like it or not, all of us are intertwined in complex technological systems: an electric power grid, a national network of air traffic controllers, and a gasoline and natural gas distribution network. Much of what we use to provide the creature comforts in everyday life has become too technologically complex or too physically large for the average citizen to comprehend. Moreover, our educational system does little to educate their students to understand the technology within which they are immersed.

Thus, in response to real or imagined ills, society has developed mechanisms for countering some of the ills and/or slowing down the rate of social change. The major social forces that have had an important impact on engineering design are occupa-tional safety and health, consumer rights, environmental protection, the antinuclear movement, and the freedom of information and public disclosure movement. The result of those social forces has been a great increase in federal regulations (in the interest of protecting the public) over many aspects of commerce and business and/or a drastic change in the economic payoff for new technologically oriented ventures. Those new factors have had a profound effect on the practice of engineering and the rate of innovation.

The following are some general ways in which increased societal awareness of technology, and subsequent regulation, have influenced the practice of engineering design:

● Greater influence of lawyers on engineering decisions, often leading to product liability actions

● More time spent in planning and predicting the future effects of engineering projects

● Increased emphasis on “defensive research and development,” which is designed to protect the corporation against possible litigation

● Increased effort expended in research, development, and engineering in environmental control and safety

Clearly, these societal pressures have placed much greater constraints on how engineers can carry out their designs. Moreover, the increasing litigiousness of U.S. society requires a greater awareness of legal and ethical issues on the part of each engineer.

One of the most prevalent societal pressures at the present time is the environmental movement. Originally, governmental regulation was used to clean up rivers and streams, to ameliorate smog conditions, and to reduce the volume of solid waste that is sent to landfills. Today, there is a growing realization that placing environmental issues at a high priority (not doing them because the government demands it) represents smart business. Several major oil producers publicly take seriously the link between carbon dioxide emissions and rising global temperatures and have embarked on a major effort to become the leaders in renewable energy sources like solar power and fuel from biomass. A major chemical company has placed great emphasis on developing environmentally friendly products. Its biodegradable herbicides allow for a hundredfold reduction in the herbicide that must be applied per acre, greatly reducing toxic runoff into streams. This reorientation of business thinking toward environmental issues is often called  sustainable development, businesses built on renewable materials and fuels.

Characteristics of an Environmentally Responsible Design  (Table 1)

● Easy to disassemble

● Able to be recycled 

● Contains recycled materials

● Uses identifiable and recyclable plastics

● Reduces use of energy and natural materials in its manufacture

● Manufactured without producing hazardous waste

● Avoids use of hazardous materials

● Reduces product chemical emissions

● Reduces product energy consumption

The change in thinking, from fixing environmental problems at the discharge end of the pipe or smokestack to sustainable development, places engineering design at the heart of the issue. Environmental issues are given higher priority in design. Products must be designed to make them easier to reuse, recycle, or incinerate—a concept often called green design.Green design also involves the detailed understanding of the environmental impact of products and processes over their entire life cycle. For example, life-cycle analysis would be used to determine whether paper or plastic grocery bags are more environmentally benign. Table 1 gives the chief aspects of an environmentally responsible design.

It seems clear that the future is likely to involve more technology, not less, so that engineers will face demands for innovation and design of technical systems of unprecedented complexity. While many of these challenges will arise from the requirement to translate new scientific knowledge into hardware, others will stem from the need to solve problems in “socialware.” By socialware we mean the patterns of organiza-

tion and management instructions needed for the hardware to function effectively. Such designs will have to deal not only with the limits of hardware, but also with the vulnerability of any system to human ignorance, human error, avarice, and hubris. A good example of this point is the delivery system for civilian air transportation. While the engineer might think of the modern jet transport, with all of its complexity and high technology, as the main focus of concern, such a marvelous piece of hardware only satisfies the needs of society when embedded in an intricate system that includes airports, maintenance facilities, traffic controllers, navigation aids, baggage handling, fuel supply, meal service, bomb detection, air crew training, and weather monitoring. It is important to realize that almost all of these socialware functions are driven by federal or local rules and regulations. Thus, it should be clear that the engineering profession is required to deal with much more than technology. Techniques for dealing with the complexity of large systems have been developed in the discipline of systems engineering . 

Another area where the interaction between technical and human networks is becoming stronger is in consideration of risk, reliability, and safety. No longer can safety factors simply be looked up in codes or standards. Engineers must recognize that design requirements depend on public policy as much as industry performance requirements. This is an area of design where government influence has become much stronger.

There are five key roles of government in interacting with technology:

●   As a stimulus to free enterprise through manipulation of the tax system 

●   By influencing interest rates and the supply of venture capital through changes in fiscal policy to control the growth of the economy

●   As a major customer for high technology, chiefly in military systems 

●   As a funding source (patron) for research and development

●   As a regulator of technology

Engineering is concerned with problems whose solution is needed and/or desired by society. The purpose of this section is to reinforce that point, and hopefully to show the engineering student how important a broad knowledge of economics and social science is to modern engineering practice.

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