A Philosophy of Technology: From Technical Artefacts to Sociotechnical Systems
Teacher education programs have the dual task of teaching specific subject content while also providing examples of how this content can be taught in schools. This task is especially important, and also problematic, when it comes to technology and science education, where hands-on components such as design/construction exercises, laboratory exercises, and excursions are central epistemic practices. When COVID-19 hit, Swedish universities were forced to change from campus-based teaching to online distance education, termed “emergency remote teaching (ERT).” The present study aims to investigate university teachers’ experiences of how hands-on components in science and technology education worked in the ERT mode that arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis was performed with a social semiotics and community of inquiry framework, and shows that both the type of instruction and the subject content were impacted. In particular, the reduced opportunities for students to apply scientific and technical methods and the reduced ability of teachers to determine whether the students had understood their instruction generated new ways of communicating and supporting the students’ learning. Therefore, analysis of meaning making in science and technology online-learning contexts needs to address the topics of the nature of science (NOS) and the nature of technology (NOT). An extended, three-dimensional model of meaning making is suggested.
STEM—science, technology, engineering, and mathematics—has become important as an educational construct and phenomenon in recent years. However, it is only just recently that STEM education has begun to be examined from a philosophical point of view. There is therefore a need for further investigation of its philosophical basis, particularly in relation to integrated STEM education (iSTEM). Recent conceptual and empirical studies emphasize the crucial role of design in achieving successful STEM integration, and design thinking has also lately gained traction in such integration. The aim of this study is to investigate an integrated philosophy of STEM education, based on the
methodological backbone of design. The research methodology consisted of a critical review of the literature regarding the philosophy of STEM (education), science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and STEM education research, related to the current issues of integrating the various STEM subjects. We thus base the philosophical framework on philosophy and studies from/on the STEM subjects in education. It is concluded that from a methodological point of view, design holds promising affordances for unifying the STEM subjects through “pure STEM problems”. Design as part of, for instance, particular engineering design projects may consequently require the “design” of applicable scientific experiments as well as mathematics expressions and formulae specifically when engaging in technological modeling.
Cybersecurity threats are regarded as one of the most significant global risks worldwide. The greater integration of technologies into organizational and societal functioning is associated with expanding cyber-attack surfaces and growing cybersecurity threats. Given the increasing frequency and complexity of adverse cyber events, organizations relying on digital technologies need to move from a posture of cybersecurity to one of cyber resilience to maintain their effective functioning. Cyber resilience management frameworks serve as the standard for organizations to build or improve their cyber resilience posture. Even though most cyber-attacks exploit the socio-technical gaps of a system, cyber resilience management frameworks proposed by security solutions providers, standard organizations, and academics have primarily employed a techno-centric approach to cyber resilience. This article explores the socio-technical shortcomings in cyber resilience management frameworks proposed in academic literature. To do so, it conceptualizes organizational cyber resilience from the perspectives of the socio-technical system. The systematic analysis contributes to identifying the extent of inclusion of socio-technical systems thinking in cyber resilience management frameworks and proposes potential future research directions.KeywordsCyber resilienceCybersecuritySocio-technicalFrameworkICTs
While systems engineers and philosophers of technology have analysed failure in artefacts, the nature of failure in sociotechnical systems has been largely underdeveloped. Sociotechnical systems differ from artefacts in that they are made up of relationships between people and technologies, and this difference means that failure needs a different analysis. In this article, we provide an account of two kinds of malfunctioning in sociotechnical systems. To accomplish this, we draw on resources from the disciplines of Human Factors, Systems Engineering, and Philosophy of Technology. We offer an account of two kinds of malfunction that are not only dependent on functions but also on roles of people involved in the functioning of sociotechnical systems. Hence, we aim to broaden the discourse of malfunctions in sociotechnical systems in terms of relations (relational roles). Primarily, we address two roles of users and operators and show how these different roles involve different kinds of malfunctions. Specifically, we highlight that two kinds of malfunctions can occur in sociotechnical systems: ambiguity-based failure and expectation-based failure.
Since the first two decades of the twenty century, large amounts of data have been
widely available for consumption. This has created a trend towards data-based narratives. This style of writing requires certain skills related to data retrieval and manipulation not only to create, but also to interpret. The ability to read, work, analyze and argue with data is called data literacy. These skills are not always well developed in schools, even though related aspects are mentioned in Brazil’s National Curriculum (BNCC). Holes in basic education will eventually lead to citizens who are not able to critically read a data-based piece, and might more easily fall prey to fake news or misleading news stories. Through Design Science Research we designed an artifact to turn students’ tacit knowledge about data literacy into explicit, by using Grounded Theory to code data group storytelling told by two samples of students in two cycles of case study as means to discover data literacy skills to create an early version of a data literacy scale. The artifact was evaluated positively by mathematicians, statisticians, and a data scientist from public institutions, who contributed with suggestions to a final version of the scale. Our contributions include a qualitative data literacy scale, that assesses students on sixty data literacy abilities organized into seven categories that go from "data collection" to "make informed decisions"; an actualized data literacy definition, and a framework generalizing the process of scale development.
Fewer qualified platforms and reduced personnel within the navy are the reality for many nations, although operational requirements might have remained the same or increased over time. At the same time, research is advancing in unmanned and autonomous systems, which have also found application in military use. Therefore , navies need to develop approaches for effective technological transformation. To fulfil this need, this study aims to identify and describe the relevant research from different disciplines and their respective relation to the design of future navies. The study commences with a literature review related to knowledge support for understanding how emerging technologies, such as maritime autonomous systems (MAS), find their place in a military organisation. The findings suggest that the armed forces should be categorised as a sociotechnical system, built of systems-of-systems that together enable capability, and that it is as a capability enforcer that the overall system should be developed. This highlights the importance of structural and organisational changes in making the best use of the technology, as well as in making the sociotech-nical system as efficient as possible. Therefore, the armed forces need to be learning organisations, exercising joint planning, where there is room for knowledge sharing and flexibility within the organisation despite different hierarchical layers.
Within STS, there are three approaches to the creation and mobilization of futures: descriptive, normative, and interventive. Visions, expectations, and imaginaries are currently seen as anticipatory artifacts that close down the momentum of sociotechnical systems and, as such, are objects of critical scrutiny. At the same time, interventive techniques engaging with future representations are considered to be useful anticipatory instruments for opening up ranges of envisaged alternatives. This article reviews STS advances concerning the performativity of both de facto and interventive anticipatory practices in shaping the momentum of sociotechnical systems in light of the phenomenon of modal power: the modulation dynamics of what actors deem to be (im)plausible and/or (un)desirable. The diverse attempts of STS scholars and practitioners to understand, critique, and engage with the politics of opening up and closing down the momentum of sociotechnical systems require engaging with the creation, mobilization, and execution of modal power. The heuristics presented here are intended to be useful in framing and recognizing the political-epistemic radicality that the creation and mobilization of sociotechnical futures holds in the constitution of our sociotechnical orders as well as the role that the attribution of (im)plausibility or (un)desirability plays in such processes.
Technology transfer is considered an important issue in the process of industrial development. At the same time, it has gained more attention due to current economic revolutions and modern paradigms in production. Furthermore, technology transfer per se has been changed a lot in its revolutionary path and soft technology has been defined as a new paradigm. The present study reviewed definitions and philosophy of technology, technology transfer models in general with
emphasis on soft technology transfer models. The results showed that since humanity technology is philosophically defined by work, practice comes over theorization and normally, technology
has priority over science in terms of epistemology. The findings from the literature indicated that majority of studies on soft commercial technology transfer are based upon modeling approach
and at the same time, the most prevalent classification for technology transfer is intra-organizational and intra-corporate soft technology transfer. Moreover, the focus of economic commercial soft technology transfer has been on energy sector in recent years whereas it has
shifted onto enterprise level business organization. In addition, important issues to be studied in literature included optimization of production and business services (lean production, comprehensive quality management, ISO, Kanban, organizational resources planning, global
branding, marketing, etc.) which are in favor of higher competitiveness in organization and survival of economic enterprise in the competitive condition. It seems that the most important issue in literature is realization of business goals and productive and operational goals in
organizations including small and medium enterprises.
Keywords: model, technology transfer, commercial soft technology.
The starting point of this article is the observation that the emergence of the Anthropocene rehabilitates the need for philosophical reflections on the ontology of technology. In particular, if technological innovations on an ontic level of beings in the world are created, but these innovations at the same time create the Anthropocene World at an ontological level, this raises the question how World creation has to be understood. We first identify four problems with the traditional concept of creation: the anthropocentric, ontic and outcome orientation of traditional concepts of creation, as well as its orientation of material fabrication. We subsequently develop a progressive concept of World creation with four characteristics that move beyond the traditional conceptuality: (1) a materialistic concept of creation that accounts for (2) the ontogenetic process and (3) the ontic and ontological nature of creation, and (4) is conceptualized as semantic creation of the World in which we live and act.
In terms of technological progress, students of public administration confront a challenging dilemma where normative reflection in the realm of technology ethics has not kept pace with the rapidity and magnitude of technological advancement. Consequently, this necessitates further reflection on how to best apply aspects of ethical behavior to the development and usage of technology in the public sector. The significant role of the technology ethics in public service has received meager consideration in the literature, lacking a theoretical foundation that can help guide practitioners (as techno-ethicists) through rapid transitions in technological progress. Using the philosophy of technology literature, this article seeks to address this gap in public administration theory by considering first, how technological advancements affect the nature of didactic power relationships between the public and government; and second how the concept of technological nonneutrality is framed as a basis for structuring what obligations public administrators have when adopting and using technology in public service. This includes reflection upon the expanding role of newer technologies such as Artificial Intelligence in reshaping the nature of government-society relationships. Framing techno-ethical principles in theoretical dialogue prompts greater awareness for how practitioners may effectively respond as moral agents to rapidly changing technological advancements.
Early twenty-first-century society is permeated by different kinds of technological systems. Such systems attract a great deal of research in different academic disciplines, but in education, research on technological systems as a comprehensive element in schools, tertiary institutions and universities is limited. This edited book was written by a group of scholars from a variety of educational disciplines with the majority from technology, engineering and science education, with the goal of summarizing, synthesizing and possibly expanding current research on the teaching and learning of technological systems. The aim of this final chapter is to synthesize research on the teaching and learning of technological systems as it has been presented in the book.
It is important for students to have knowledge about the basic characteristics of technological systems, because they differ in crucial respects compared to single technological artefacts. Moreover, many technological systems have a far-reaching impact on society and the environment, while at the same time they are socially shaped and controlled by human beings. In the literature such systems are often called socio-technical systems. The aim of this chapter is to investigate the key characteristics of technological systems in time and space, in order to inform teaching of technological systems. The specific characteristics of technological systems include them being: socio-technical with both societal and technical components; developed by system builders and managed by professional organizations; with a spatial scope ranging from local/city-wide, regional, national to global networks; dependent on control features including feedback loops as crucial mechanisms for making the systems stable. These technological systems also evolve—and sometimes devolve—in distinct phases and in particular societal, economic and geographical contexts, which may have repercussions when they are transferred. Furthermore, the systems are dependent on each other which over time and space leads to an entanglement of systems. Technological systems, finally, have a huge impact on the environment, which is why students will need to critically consider the human dependence on systems. This chapter introduces a number of systems concepts that might also be fruitfully used as educational concepts in teaching about technological systems. This way students can learn to generalize knowledge of technological systems, so that they can take on, understand and critique different kinds of systems, even ones that have not been designed yet.
Technological systems as a school curriculum component is complex, under-developed and under-researched. In this chapter, we present results from an investigation of school students’ knowledge about technological systems, hypothesizing the occurrence of different “qualities of knowledge”. A test instrument was distributed to 26 groups of students (n = 56) in a Swedish grade eight class (14–15 year olds), and data analysis was carried out using a qualitative, hermeneutic method. The findings show that the students’ qualities of knowledge regarding the overall structure of the systems was quite advanced, but the systems or the societal context were not elaborated upon with any detail. The purpose of the system could be connected to humans and society, but students did not offer a description of the overall purpose. The flows that the students described were only of matter (water, wastewater) but not energy or information. The system boundary was also elusive, except for waste coming out of the sewer system and other environmental consequences. Thus, the test instrument was useful to gauge students’ qualities of knowledge, especially regarding system structure, but with respect to some other system aspects the validity might need to be further improved.
The rise of Digital Humanism calls for shaping digital technologies in accordance with human values and needs. I argue that to achieve this goal, an epistemic and methodological dimension should be added to the ethical reflections developed in the last years. In particular, I propose the framework of explorative experimentation in computer science and engineering to set an agenda for the reflection on the ethical issues of digital technologies that seriously considers their peculiarities from an epistemic point of view. As the traditional epistemic categories of the natural sciences cannot be directly adopted by computer science and engineering, the traditional moral principles guiding experimentation in the natural sciences should be reconsidered in the case of digital technologies where uncertainty about their impacts and risks is very high.
The use of virtual education in teaching has provided a wide range of new educational opportunities; but the combination of ethical and legal risks associated with accessing and exchanging information in the form of ethical issues in the digital space has challenged this type of education. In this regard, in the present study, an attempt has been made to express the faculty members' experiences of ethics in virtual education. The research method was qualitative and based on this, 15 samples were interviewed from two groups of experts in technology and computer science and the field of social and humanities sciences. Content analysis method was used to analyze qualitative data. The results showed that faculty members' perceptions of the issue of ethics in virtual education originates from two approaches: ethical character and ethical security. Also, the results of research related to the ethical issues of using virtual education in higher education by faculty members show that these issues are raised in four dimensions of learning environmental health, cultural dimension, security dimension and identity dimension. In addition, the results show that ethical standards can be placed in three levels of civil liability to students, civil liability as a professional faculty member, and civil liability to the virtual education system. These ethical standards can include ethical issues try to solve them.
Despite the importance of well-being, few studies have been conducted on the relationship between well-being and technology. In this paper, the development of technology from the perspective of well-being studies are divided into three generations. In higher generations, the main criterion of technology development becomes more comprehensive, in order to decrease the side effects of technology. We introduce the fourth generation in which well-being is the main criterion of the design process. Although it may not seem necessary to say that the purpose of most technologies is implicitly well-being, we show that the domination of physical pleasure in terms of “use and convenience” in the modern era can decrease human well-being through a declination of our necessary abilities such as resilience, self-control and problem-solving. So we suggest that instead of paying attention to values separately, well-being, in its broadest sense including physical, psychological, and social aspects, should be considered in the design process as an ultimate goal of technology development. Finally, some deontological approaches and consequentialist approaches are suggested to achieve well-being in the fourth generation of technology development.
This study aims at characterizing elementary pre-service teachers’ conscious lack of knowledge about familiar technical artefacts and its relation to their knowledge about these artefacts. The participants were asked to state what they knew and also what they did not know about a sample of familiartechnical artefacts such as a fan or a lock. The results showed a difference between the structure of the student teachers’ lack of knowledge of these artefacts and the structure of their actual knowledge. These differences were analyzed in relation to Kroes’ (Camb J Econ 34:51–62, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1093/cje/bep019) model of technical artefacts. Firstly, the student teachers’ conscious lack of knowledge was mainly focused on the artefacts’ behavior rather than on their components and materials. Secondly, the participants found the function features of the artefacts unproblematic. Thirdly, unknown features about the origin of the artefacts were more frequently cited than the corresponding knowledge features. Finally, non-perceptual properties of the artefacts and the causal relations in which they or their parts are involved were important components both of the students’ knowledge and of the students’ unknowns.
From a design science perspective, information systems and their components are viewed as artifacts. However, not much has been written yet on the ontological status of artifacts or their structure. After March & Smith’s (1995) initial classification of artifacts in terms of models, constructs, methods and instantiations, there have been only a few attempts to come up with a more systematic approach. This conceptual paper provides an ontological analysis of the notion of artifact grounded in the foundational ontology UFO. Its core is an ontological characterization of artifacts, and technical objects in general from a Design Science Research perspective, developed in conversation with other approaches. This general artifact ontology is applied in a systematic classification of IS artifacts. We include practical implications for Design Science Research.
This article aims to answer what I call the “constitution question of engineering modeling”: in virtue of what does an engineering model model its target system? To do so, I will offer a category-theoretic, structuralist account of design, using the olog framework. Drawing on this account, I will conclude that engineering and scientific models are not only cognitively but also representationally indistinguishable. I will finally propose an axiological criterion for distinguishing scientific from engineering modeling.
From a philosophical viewpoint, technological design is about connecting what is desirable with what is technically possible. Technology itself plays a major role in design processes, not only because technology development is what designing is all about, but also since the existing technology at any given point in time frames what is possible to achieve in terms of new outcomes. A limiting role of technology in design, education and other societal activities goes under the concept of technological determinism and has arguably been one of the most significant points of debate in the social sciences in the last decades. The aim of this article is to investigate how philosophical, sociological and historical research, as well as design and innovation research about technological determinism, could be fruitfully reconsidered in technology education. The analysis yielded three novel findings about the nature of technological determinism. First of all, technological determinism can take the form of an idea, theory or a way of explaining technology development in history or the present, but it can also take the form of actual material structures that-implicitly or explicitly-permeate and influence society, or, at least, this is what some researchers claim. Secondly, technological determinism is not just something that is the result of a bird's eye view of technology and society or when we study technology as part of the macro level of society. Determinism can appear on all levels, even the micro level. Thirdly, like its counterpart social/societal determinism, technological determinism is not necessarily a "bad" thing, but a natural result of design being a balance between what is societally desirable and technically possible. The most critical issue from the point of view of technological literacy is to promote the idea that it is humans that design and retain control over technology.
The chapters in this book reveal a rich tapestry of pedagogical options from which educators can choose, based on a rationale that is appropriate to their educational purpose. The rationale may derive from theory (constructivism, sociocultural theory, critical theory, critical pedagogy, activity theory), it may derive from an element of design and technology education (design, making, systems, digital technology, critiquing), or it may derive from a related issue (STEM, problem-solving, the material world, poorly resources environments, vocational-general technology education, pupil teacher interactions). Regardless of its derivation, the discussions throughout the book begin with a particular rationale for design and technology education, and from that base, explore aligned pedagogies.
Technological systems are interwoven into the very fabric of modern society to such an extent that we often take them for granted and they almost become invisible to us, because much of the infrastructure is hidden in the ground beneath us or behind walls. Many modern technological systems are also abstract in the sense that they include invisible connections and flows, for example, in cellular phone communications or GPS navigation. These systems also have societal components such as organizations, legislation and operators. Technological systems thus challenge traditional teaching and learning related to artefacts in technology education, since systems are much more difficult to grasp and also have some different characteristics and dynamics compared to single objects. The aim of this chapter is to address this challenge by presenting and discussing the characteristics of technological systems in relation to teaching and learning about systemic aspects of our lifeworld. We suggest four pedagogies to achieve this: interface pedagogy, holistic pedagogy, historical pedagogy and design pedagogy. Furthermore, we propose two ways of delimiting systems through two types of boundaries that are crucial in this regard: the systems horizon and the system border.
This paper outlines a fuzzy cognitive mapping (FCM) approach for engaging users in constructing a model for engineering design system analysis. The model’s scope is drawn in reference to a socio-technical system and demonstrated with an assembly production system (a socio-technical system archetype). In particular, this paper focuses on modeling an existing assembly production system that needs to be re-designed, then analyzing the system models to inform the re-design task. The modeling approach engages users as participants (18 in this research) in observation and interviews, and these data are coded into adjacency matrices and fuzzy cognitive maps separately then integrated. The ability to model multiple users and technical entities together in breadth and detail, qualitatively and quantitatively, enables designers to zoom in to see the detail and zoom out to see a holistic perspective. The models are analyzed for overall cause, effect, and central variables. Through the FCM analysis of these variables, the elements of the existing design solution are made explicit, including inputs, external and boundary constraints, design principles, outcomes and outputs, function, and operations and structure. This is particularly useful in re-design, as demonstrated in the industrial re-design project here, where the FCM models make the current system design explicit and their analyses inform re-design intent by being synthesized into re-design foci and tasks.
In der Debatte um autonome Waffensysteme (AWS) spielt das Motiv der menschlichen Kontrolle über die Entscheidungsprozesse dieser Systeme eine zentrale Rolle. Der Text zeigt auf, welche möglichen Entwicklungshorizonte derzeitige Konzeptstudien des US-Militärs vorsehen und inwieweit diese Konzepte sich mit fiktionalen Narrativen aus dem Spielfilm kreuzen. Zunächst wird dazu die zeitgenössische Debatte um AWS charakterisiert. Im Anschluss wird dargelegt, inwieweit das Motiv der Kontrolle über Entscheidungsprozesse der Maschinen in ausgewählten Hollywood-Spielfilmen den 1980er- und frühen 1990er-Jahren vorgezeichnet ist. Ein Ausblick auf die Konsequenzen, welche die Entwicklung autonomer Waffensysteme hinsichtlich der Interfaces zwischen Mensch und Maschine mit sich bringen, rundet die Ausführungen ab.
Epistemological issues in engineering knowledge have traditionally played a central role in the debate over the assessment of the philosophy of engineering as a disciplinary field. However, only few works have explicitly focused on experimental methodology and attempted to systematically compare the traditional experimental method of the natural sciences to the kind of experimentation carried out in engineering research. In this paper, by investigating some areas of computer engineering, and in particular autonomous robotics, I claim that traditional experimentation cannot be always applied as such to computer engineering and that the notion of explorative experiment is a good candidate to be considered. Explorative experiments are a form of investigation of novel ideas or techniques without the typical constraints of rigorous experimental methodologies. They are driven by the desire of investigating the realm of possibilities pertaining to the functioning of a technical artefact and its interaction with the environment in the absence of a proper theory or theoretical background.
Analysis of everyday work practices in sociotechnical systems for eliciting design/intervention requirements involves appropriate work analysis frameworks. The current article provides an extension to one such framework — Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) — by scrutinising its sociotechnical basis. CWA's forte depends on its ‘design for adaptation’, system related operations, and operators. In contrast, sociotechnical work systems require not only operators and adaptation, but also a significant emphasis on ‘users’ and ‘appropriation’. The current article extends CWA (based on Rasmussen's original concepts) for users; subsequently allowing for system flexibility and possibilities of ‘appropriation’ within acceptable boundaries of the system's correct functioning. To this end, the first phase of Work Domain Analysis is extended by adding a new layer to the abstraction hierarchy (AH), based on Rasmussen's original insights.
In this epilogue I start with a recapitulation of the dual-nature thesis of technical artefacts while highlighting its main innovative features in comparison to existing theories of technical artefacts and technical functions. Then, looking ahead to interesting topics of further research, I propose to shift attention from technical artefacts taken in isolation, as I have done in this book, to technical artefacts as embedded within social systems. These broader systems are usually referred to as ‘socio-technical’ systems. The notion of a socio-technical system opens up new and interesting ways to study the mutual interaction between the technical and the social world and is rapidly gaining currency in various fields of study. However, a clear conceptualization of this kind of system is still lacking. As their name already indicates, socio-technical systems seem to have a hybrid nature as well, but a brief look suffices to show that the kind of hybridity encountered here is different from the hybridity of technical artefacts.
The debate on the experimental method, its role, its limits, and its possible applications has recently gained attention in autonomous robotics. If, from the one hand, classical experimental principles, such as repeatability and reproducibility, play as an inspiration for the development of good experimental practices in this research area, from the other hand, some recent analyses have evidenced that rigorous experimental approaches are not yet full part of the research habits in this community. In this paper, in order to give reason of a part of the current experimental practice in autonomous robotics that cannot be satisfactorily accommodated under the traditional concept of controlled experiment, we will advance the notion of explorative experiment. Explorative experiments in this context should be intended as a form of investigation carried out in the absence of a proper theory or theoretical background, where the control of the experimental factors cannot be fully managed from the beginning. We show that this notion arises from (and is supported by) the analysis of the experimental activities reported in a significant sample of papers that have been given awards at two of the largest and most impacting robotics research conferences.
In this chapter we demonstrate that contemporary design methodology provides methods for design for moral values. Subsequently, we explore the methodological challenges and problems that this brings to the table. First, we show that contemporary design methods are aimed at realizing values of users and society. These values are in general not moral ones yet do include in specific cases moral values. Second, we introduce a division between user-driven methods in which it are the users who introduce the values to be designed for and designer-driven methods in which the clients and designers are introducing these values. Third, we discuss two designer-driven design methods in detail for, respectively, design in general and social design in particular: the Vision in Product design method and the Social Implication Design method. Finally, we explore the challenges and problems of design for moral values with these and other design methods. We focus specifically on the designer who, once design is recognized as design for moral values, becomes responsible for the moral values the resulting products have. We argue that in this case the designer should make the moral values of products transparent to clients and users.
The definition of good experimental methodologies is a topic of growing interest in autonomous mobile robotics. Recently, researchers in this field have started to recognize that their experimental methodologies have not yet reached the level of maturity of other disciplines. In the effort of improving the quality of experimental activities, some proposals have been made to take inspiration from how experiments are performed in traditional sciences. However, a comprehensive analysis of the peculiar features involved in the experimentation of autonomous mobile robots intended as engineering artifacts is, to the best of our knowledge, still lacking. In this paper, we aim at contributing to fill this gap by discussing experiments in autonomous mobile robotics from an engineering point of view. We start by considering autonomous mobile robots as technical artifacts, namely as physical entities designed for a technical function and provided with a use plan. Then, we show that, due to the nature of the field, scientific and engineering aspects are strongly interrelated in the experimental activities performed to assess and evaluate autonomous mobile robots. To make our discussion more concrete, we refer to some examples taken from the specific robotic application of search and rescue of victims after a disaster.
In this chapter we demonstrate that contemporary design methodology provides methods for design for moral values. Subsequently, we explore the methodological challenges and problems that this brings to the table. First, we show that contemporary design methods are aimed at realizing values of users and society. These values are in general not moral ones yet do include in specific cases moral values. Second, we introduce a division between user-driven methods in which it are the users who introduce the values to be designed for and designer-driven methods in which the clients and designers are introducing these values. Third, we discuss two designer-driven design methods in detail for, respectively, design in general and social design in particular: the Vision in Product design method and the Social Implication Design method. Finally, we explore the challenges and problems of design for moral values with these and other design methods. We focus specifically on the designer who, once design is recognized as design for moral values, becomes responsible for the moral values the resulting products have. We argue that in this case the designer should make the moral values of products transparent to clients and users.
Engineering is increasingly of systems that are not only complex – in being multilayered – but also hybrid – in containing people as components. This chapter does not discuss the already well-researched safety concerns generated by this development with respect to operators, users, and bystanders but instead addresses values of relevance to the presence in such systems of operators as agents: values associated with what we can reasonably ask people to do and what we make people responsible for. From the perspective of design, systems containing people as components deviate in four ways from traditional systems consisting of all-hardware components. (1) Such systems are not designed as a whole but gradually and modularly. (2) They are typically delivered as incomplete because their operators have to be added by the client or owner during implementation; only operator roles are strictly speaking designed. (3) Persons performing these roles become components of the system only partially; unlike hardware components their behavior continues to be monitored and controlled from a perspective external to the system. (4) Operator roles are often explicitly conceived as being partially external, in that an operator’s task is ultimately to ensure that the system continues to function properly come what may. These features lead to conflicts with the autonomy of operators as persons and the wellfoundedness of assigning particular responsibilities to them. The difficulties described here should make us rethink whether traditional engineering approaches to system design are adequate for such hybrid systems.
Concepts of function are central to design but statements about a device's functions can be interpreted in different ways. This raises problems for researchers trying to clarify the foundations of design theory and for those developing design support-tools that can represent and reason about function. By showing how functions relate systems to their sub-systems and super-systems, this article illustrates some limitations of existing function terminology and some problems with existing function statements. To address these issues, a system-relative function terminology is introduced. This is used to demonstrate that systems function not only with respect to their most local super-system, but also with respect to their more global super-systems.
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