Design as a focus for teaching professional ethics

Summary form only given. Among the occasions in which technical professionals encounter ethical choices are ones that involve design. Issues about public health and safety, environmental quality and social well-being are often deeply embedded in features of the instrument system or structure that are the focus of a professional's work. Understanding how choices expressed in design involve moral and political questions, learning how to envision and think about such matters, should be an ability mastered in one's university education and cultivated throughout one's career. Resources for teaching of this kind, however, are not commonly developed in attempts to link philosophical ethics to the practice of technical professionals. Educators must help students explore design, seen as a boundary where "ends" and "means" connect or disconnect with powerful, long term consequences.