Ethical considerations in engineering design processes - IEEE Technology and Society Magazine

15 Engineering ethics is usually seen as the field of study that focuses on the ethical aspects of the actions and decisions of engineers, both individually and collectively. Interest in engineering ethics, especially in the context of engineering education, has been rapidly increasing during the last few decades. As existing textbooks and other publications demonstrate, engineering ethics involves a broad range of (ethical) issues. Here we focus on the specific area of engineering ethics pertaining to engineering design. We believe that engineering design constitutes an interesting starting point for ethical issues in engineering, both for educational and research purposes. As far as we know, there has not been much systematic research on ethical aspects in engineering design and on how engineers deal with such aspects. Engineering design is also an interesting topic to research from the point of view of engineering ethics because design is one of the main activities in which engineers are involved. Moreover, technology has social Ethical Considerations IN ENGINEERING DESIGN PROCESSES