Designing with Integrity: A Practical Guide to Ethical Design

Introduction

Ethics is a very important topic in engineering, and it governs each decision you make as an engineer, both personally and professionally. 

In the UK, there is an organisation called the Engineering Council. (you can view their website here). The Engineering Council is the UK regulatory body for the engineering profession, they set the requirements and hold the register of legally protected professional titles such as Chartered Engineers (CEng), Incorporated Engineers (IEng), and Engineering Technicians (EngTech).

Code of Conduct

They have four major principles.

1. Practise competently and maintain up-to-date knowledge and skills

That is, you should only practise in the area which you are qualified. So if you are a civil engineer for example, you should not therefore be signing off drawings on aircraft that you have no prior experience in.

2. Act with integrity and respect for others

You shouldn’t act ‘dishonestly’ or try to deceive other engineers, or members of the public. This could be in the form of rejecting bribery, or declaring conflicts of interest.

3. Promote sustainability

Sustainability is an important topic. As an engineer you need to be aware of environmental obligations, whilst also avoiding exploitation of resources. This is covered in more details below

4. Exercise engineering leadership

As a leader in engineering, you should be actively seen to promote and follow these rules. Act to support others during the engineering career, and act to take positive action if we come across risk or malpractice.

To look at what these mean in more details, read directly on the IMechE website:

Regulations differ from Standards in that they are enforceable by law. When you work in any field of engineering, you should be aware what regulations cover that area, as failing to adhere to any relevant regulations would be breaking the law.

Design for Sustainability

What do we mean by sustainability?

Sustainability means maintaining life into the long term future.

Sustainable engineering is the process of using resources in a way that does not compromise the environment or deplete the materials for future generations. Sustainable engineering requires an interdisciplinary approach in all aspects of engineering and it should not be designated as a sole responsibility of environmental engineering. All engineering fields should incorporate sustainability into their practice in order to improve the quality of life for all.

It includes an understanding that social, economic, and environmental issues are all inter-related.

There are three elements of a sustainable global society, which can be represented in a sustainability triangle:

In practise,that means a country with a strong economy should remain so

• Without damaging the environment
• Or debilitating another society (or their ‘local’ environment)

Global view

If we split the total land available by the number of people on the planet, there would be 1.9 hectares available per person.

This needs to account for:

• Land to grow food
• Manufacture clothes
• Produce energy
• Cope with waste

Amongst many other requirements.

The ‘world average’ person uses 2.3 global hectares, the UK average person uses 5.5 global hectares, whilst the average person in North America uses 9.6 global hectares.

To put this into perspective, if every person on the planet lived to the same standard of living as North America, we would need two more Earth sized planets to sustain ourselves indefinitely.

But what does this have to do with Engineering Design?

Design has a strong influence on the final product. If we consider the final product costs, design accounts for just 5% of the total cost; but a 70% influence on the final product cost. As per the diagram below:

Good Engineering design is important because it accounts for just 5% of the total product cost, but has 70% influence on the overall product cost, by ensuring the most appropriate materials and manufacturing processes can be used.

But also, design influences what people want to buy.

Therefore if we consider design alongside the sustainability triangle above, we can see that:

Product Lifecycle

Environmental and social impacts occur at every stage of the product lifecycle. Take a look at the diagram below:

These impacts become ‘locked in’ at the design stage when decisions are made about materials, performance, power source etc. Therefore environmental and social considerations need to be included within the Design Specification. 

For example:

• Environment – Product must be ‘zero emission’ device
• Social – Product components must be sourced from fair-trade organisations

Using the sustainability triangle

Let’s take an example of a simple everyday product such as cardboard packaging:

Where En = Environment, S = Society, Ec = Economy

Therefore for this example, we can consider that the sustainability triangle is well balanced:

The problem arises when this sustainability triangle is not well balanced, for example, let’s imagine a product with the below sustainability score:

In this example, the sustainability triangle is not balanced. We can see that the ‘economy’ decisions are taking too much influence. Perhaps cost is being prioritized instead of the environment or society impacts for example.

In summary

Sustainable design means recognising that social, economic, and environmental issues are all inter-related. By considering sustainability during the design part of the lifecycle, it;

• Promotes a system focus rather than a single product focus
• Ensures the inclusion of social and ethical considerations (as well as cost alone)
• Incorporates a long-term view of the whole product lifecycle, not just the manufacturing stage

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