Ethics in engineering is essential to ensuring what engineers do is for the good of the world. The Royal Academy of Engineering makes it clear in their statement of ethical principles that even ‘the youngest apprentice’ should be aware and follow these principles. The IET too in their Rules of Conduct stress the importance of their Engineers commitment to ethical Principles. We as a team therefore are obligated and proud to obey these rules and do our best to ensure all we do is compatible with them.
The most pertinent to our project was the second of the Royal Academy of Engineering’s ethics code, that being respect for environment and public good. Our project involves both non-recyclable parts, batteries, and the possibility of autonomous functionality.
We as a team therefore spent a lot of time ensuring our waste both in the design and prototyping of the mouse was as little as possible, reusing parts and striving to remove as much wasted material from the design as possible. As well as this, our design allows for the complete disassembly of the mouse for recycling and reusing of parts, of which we have ensured all reusable ones are socketed such that they are easy to remove and reuse.
The third pledge of the commitment, that being accuracy and rigour was an important one for us as we were constantly using potentially dangerous tools such as soldering irons, sharp blades, and glue guns. The use of goggles for all of these was followed therefore and we took care to ensure that all members of the team who soldered knew how to and were not acting unadvisedly.
As well as this, our team has given us the benefit on working on our collective communication, the fourth pledge in the statement of ethical principles. Each member came from a different country and half of our team did not have English as a first language, this meant we spent time at the beginning ensuring we could all effectively communicate, greatly benefiting us all and ‘breaking the ice’ so to speak as we had never properly engaged with each other before that. A useful website on electrical engineering ethics, linked below, has a good quite from the Board of Electrical Engineering, expanding on this principle, stating that we should strive to “maintain cordial relations with (our) fellow professionals.” It is true that through the stress of the project, different opinions came to the forefront and occasionally had the potential to lead to a heated exchange, however we were all aware how important it is to maintain good relations in the team and always settled our differences, coming out stronger as a team.
Thomas Hobbs 2114555
The Ethics of Electrical Engineering: Key Considerations
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