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Societal and Ethical Dimensions of Systems Design Key Faculty: Michael Gorman, Garrick Louis Area Description: Technological systems have consequences for both the environment and human welfare. Increasingly, large and small companies are developing ethical guidelines to govern both employee conduct and also to guide product design. This option prepares students to investigate the roles of ethics and other social factors in invention and design, and to develop technological systems that are environmentally sustainable and socially just. This graduate option involves collaboration between Systems Engineering, the Division of Technology, Culture & Communications and the Ruffin Center for Business Ethics in the Colgate Darden School of Business. Students examine the systems created by companies, entrepreneurs and inventors in developed and developing nations. They examine the process by which these new technological systems are created in order to articulate the environmental, ethical and social constructions embodied in the design of those systems. Depending on their research focus, students take a variety of courses and implement tools in systems engineering, ethics, cognitive science, environmental design and technological studies. The result should be a detailed analysis of the manifold factors in making decisions (such as environmentally responsible decisions) in the design of such a system. Alternatively, the student may propose a design for the system. The results are manifested in a thesis and case studies published in the Darden Case Bibliography (for examples, see http://repo-nt.tcc.virginia.edu/ethics).
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