How Artifacts Can Provoke Harm

It is a standard problem given to engineering students to design a stove top. There are four burners and four knobs, and their assignment is to position them all so that it is obvious which knob controls which burner. The problem is presented as an ergonomics exercise. The students are to think about how to design a stove-top layout so that a cook can use it efficiently. The first choice of which burner goes where in relation to which knob starts a chain of decisions. That first choice and each succeeding choice can cause harm, or may not. Each choice is thus an ethical choice, and the standard problem of designing a stove top thus illustrates how ethical considerations permeate design solutions, entering into what seem to be even the most mundane decisions engineers make. A mistaken configuration can lead to an error-provocative design, but we do not need that worst-case scenario to understand how ethics enters at each step in the design process.