Researcher Ibo van de Poel about value sensitive design
Ibo van de Poel ’s research focusses on the role that moral values can play in the design process that engineers go through. Van de Poel is a technology ethicist. He studied for his degree and PhD in Twente and has been working at Delft since 1998. “Innovating also involves resolving conflicting values”, he says. “Moral values like safety, durability, justice and freedom all play a role in the technological design process. But they sometimes conflict with each other. When designing a car that must be durable and affordable, you will invariably come up with a lightweight model, but this car will also be less safe. Unless we all start driving lightweight vehicles of course; then safety would again improve. So the question is this: what do moral values involve, and how do they interact?”
As an ethicist, Van de Poel thinks that engineers should not try to express all values in terms of money, but look for other ways to weigh up relative values during a design process. At the NIAS*, he will be exploring the various strategies that can be used to weigh up moral values while developing technological innovations. Like Roeser, his mission is to supplement the existing body of multi-criteria and cost/benefit analyses with philosophical considerations. “We think about various aspects that engineers are unaware of. Our critical reflection can be very useful, for example to make tacit decisions about values such as safety and durability explicit, and to take a critical look at them. On the other hand, engineers themselves can unify moral values by thinking up new technological solutions. The Dutch Oosterschelde storm surge barrier is a good example. It is a technological innovation of the highest order, a half-open barrier that takes account of two values: safety and care of the environment. I bring the world of philosophers and the world of engineers in contact with each other in a completely new way.”
| Interview fragment from: TBM Quarterly, March 2009. |  Ibo van de Poel |
* Netherlands Institute for Advances Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, where Van de Poel will go on a retreat in 2009/2010
