IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021 - 39

significantly across borders [9], [19], [20]. Today, how
ever, engineers increasingly work on complicated,
large-scale projects in big teams for multinational corporations.
There are increasing calls for global engineers
with the cross-cultural competencies to function
well within this context [21].
As a result, there is
increasing pressure for global engineering education
and practice to conform with an American-influenced
understanding of engineering-strongly capitalist in
orientation and focused on the production of lowcost,
high-volume goods [9], [22]-[24].
PIT has tended to emphasize design paradigms
such as participatory design or co-design, where all
implicated stakeholders come together with engineers
to design a technology together. This is an ideal
design framework that would have improved the
design of the Cahora Bassa Dam; however, given the
diverse and yet highly structured context where normal
technology occurs, design paradigms that involve
a variety of stakeholders, crossing numerous cultural
barriers, and an unknown number of technological
applications quickly experience difficulties of scale,
though there is optimism from researchers that technological
solutions can overcome these limitations
[25], [26]. The second half of this article seeks to
propose an additional tool that might help to address
these problems of scale and complexity.
Case study: How engineers began
designing airplanes for the subjective
needs of pilots
The development of standard metrics of public
welfare into the engineering design process has been
suggested as a method for systematically incorporating
ethical concerns into normal technology [18]. However,
the process by which subjective concerns are translated
into metrics is poorly understood [10], [18].
Vincenti, in What Engineers Know and How They
Know It, describes in detail the evolution of design
metrics within his own field of aerospace engineering.
He begins with an example of the vague feedback
given to engineers by 1st Lt. Leigh Wade, a
military test pilot, after flying an early monoplane:
" Tail heavy longitudinally ... the tail heaviness is
not tiresome because of the lightness of the controls
[17, p. 51]. "
This feedback is quite useless for the everyday
work of engineers and would require translation into
a quantifiable metric. Over the course of 25 years,
the aeronautical engineering community developed
September 2021
Figure 2. Framework for translating
qualitative experience into quantitative
metrics. The framework might prove
instructive for the translation of social
concerns into engineering design
constraints.
39
an understanding for the factors that impacted pilot
satisfaction, including elevator angle, dynamic stability,
and stick force per g. These new metrics led to the
need for new measurement devices able to measure,
for example, attack angle and yaw. In turn, pilots began
to use engineering language in their feedback, which
created a common language for engineers and users.
This community consensus eventually developed
into a framework that made academic research possible,
which was correlated back with the subjective experiences
of pilots. By the end of World War II, the military,
commercial airlines, individual pilots, and engineers
had common objective measures of a large number of
subjective piloting needs that created a " communit[y]
of technological practitioners [17, pp. 104 and 105]. "
Figure 2 presents a generalized version of Vincenti's
framework, modified to remove aeronautical-specific
terminology and to be more accessible
for PIT practitioners.
The process engineer may notice similarities
between this framework and elements of Six Sigma,
especially the DMAIC process [27]. Indeed, it should
look similar, not just to practitioners of Six Sigma,
IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2021
