Queries for the Design Norms

Engineers create technologies that shape the behaviors, priorities, and values of the user; for example, features of a road can be designed to encourage drivers to drive fast or to drive slowly, to watch for pedestrians or not, to encourage biking or not. It is not always easy to identify the values that a design fosters. To address this need, the authors of the 1986 book, Responsible Technology (RT) [1] derived eight principles from Dutch philosopher Herman Dooyeweerd’s “Aspects of Reality,” which is part of his Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea [2]. They asserted that the principles, which they called design norms (Table 1), could guide designers to produce work that shows love to God and to their neighbor. More recently, A Christian Field Guide to Technology for Engineers and Designers (CFG, 2022) provided a contemporary reflection on those design norms and included a ninth norm (Table 1) [3]. Despite the importance of these topics, there is limited guidance available in how an engineer might systematically apply these norms (or criteria in the case of ABET). In both RT and CFG, each norm is named, its meaning is discussed, and some examples of its application are provided. Several academic papers have built on the norms by using a case-study approach, applying the design norms to specific situations [4], [5], [6]. In all these cases, the impact of the norm on the designed item clarifies the authors’ understanding of the norm, but no systematic way to apply the norms to an engineering design has been fully explored. In this paper is broken into two parts. In part one, we use the model of Quaker Queries to develop a series of questions to help designers apply the norms, and then in part two, we present the results from a survey of engineers who consider how the queries might help them evaluate a recent design they have work on. In addition, ABET Student Outcomes 2 and 4 indicate that graduates from engineering programs must be able to recognize and consider the impact of their design solution on “public health, safety, and welfare, as well as global, cultural, social, environmental, and economic factors” [7]. The development of an instrument for applying the design norms can help students evaluate their designs with respect to the impacts identified in Outcomes 2 and 4. These impacts are compared to the design norms in Table 1.