What Do We Mean When We Write About Ethics, Equity, and Justice in Engineering Design?
Author(s)
Das, Madhurima; Roeder, Gillian; Ostrowski, Anastasia K; Yang, Maria C; Verma, Aditi
DownloadPublished version (1.434Mb)
Publisher Policy
Publisher Policy
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title>
<jats:p>Engineering design often requires engaging with users, clients, and stakeholders of products and systems. It is therefore important for designers to reflect on the societal and environmental implications of their design work so that they can design equitably, ethically, and justly. We conduct a review of three leading scholarly engineering design venues to investigate how, when, and why these terms — “ethics,” “equity,” and “justice,” and variations — appear in the engineering design literature and what scholars mean when they use them. We find that these terms are minimally present within the field’s scholarship and posit that design researchers may be using other terms to refer to their work that is aligned with principles of ethics, equity, and justice. We find that the prevalence of these terms has increased over time and that the terms come up throughout various stages of the design process. There appear to be a variety of motivations for including these terms, notably, sustainability and education of the next generation of designers. Finally, we propose an expanded design justice framework that is specific to engineering design. We encourage designers in our field to adopt this framework to assist them in thinking through how their engineering design work can be used to advance justice.</jats:p>
Date issued
2022-08-14Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical EngineeringJournal
Volume 6: 34th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM)
Publisher
American Society of Mechanical Engineers
Citation
Das, Madhurima, Roeder, Gillian, Ostrowski, Anastasia K, Yang, Maria C and Verma, Aditi. 2022. "What Do We Mean When We Write About Ethics, Equity, and Justice in Engineering Design?." Volume 6: 34th International Conference on Design Theory and Methodology (DTM).
Version: Final published version