Jameson M. Wetmore

Redefining risks and redistributing responsibilities: Building networks to increase automobile safety

This article draws on the history of automobile safety in the United States to illustrate how technical design has been used to promote or maintain duties, values, and ethics. It examines two specific episodes: the debates over the “crash avoidance” and “crash-worthiness” approaches in the 1960s and the responses to the accusation that air bags were killing dozens of people in the mid-1990s. In each of these debates, certain auto safety advocates promoted the development of technologies designed to circumvent, replace, or compensate for “irresponsible” human actions because they believed that devices and techniques would be considerably more obedient and reliable than the American public. Other organizations, however, contested such reallocations because they also involved a shift in responsibilities throughout the rest of the sociotechnical network of auto safety. This article argues that those who controlled the precise definition of risk in auto safety had the upper hand in constructing both the solution to the problem and the distribution of responsibilities the solution entailed.

Distributing risks and responsibilities: Flood hazard mitigation in New Orleans

Coordinated responses to flooding in the New Orleans area date back to at least the early 18 century when the Company of the Indies built a mile long bulwark on a natural levee. Since that early project, corporations, NGOs, and local, state, and federal governments have taken numerous steps to limit the risk of flooding including building extensive levee systems, redirecting rivers, and developing evacuation plans. Like many risks that have been perceived and dealt with for centuries – including crime, disease, and other natural disasters – modern science, engineering, and institutions have worked in concert with one another to address the problem through the development of large socio-technical systems. As with most large socio-technical systems, there was no single group or organization charged with overseeing all facets of the system to limit the risks of flooding in New Orleans. While some parts of the strategy to address the risks were meticulously planned, tightly coupled, and carefully coordinated, other components and institutions were only loosely connected. There was a general sense of who was responsible for what and even a few systems set up to assess whether the specific tasks were being adequately carried out. But the very nature of enormous and complex socio-technical systems is that they are too big to be centrally coordinated in any specific manner. The components of these systems are often developed for a myriad of reasons and their role in any particular mitigation system or strategy may be quite ancillary to their primary purpose. Thus the methods by which responsibilities were distributed amongst the various components were negotiated in an unsystematic and often unspoken way. Despite the fact that the mitigation efforts were not meticulously coordinated, there was certainly some general agreement over what the overall strategy for New Orleans looked like. By tracing the ways in which tasks were distributed around it one can begin to see the ways in which ideas of responsibility hold together complex systems and perhaps why these systems sometimes fail in their mission.

Amish Technology: Reinforcing values and building community

The Amish believe that their society and their technology are inextricably intertwined. In an effort to maintain and protect their community of believers, therefore, the Amish require that every technology they use not only conforms to, but reinforces their tradition, culture, and religion. They achieve these goals through two primary techniques. First they choose technologies that they believe will best promote the values they hold most dear - values like humility, equality, and simplicity. Thus they have rejected the speed, glamour and personal expression of automobiles in favor of modest, slow. and community-building horse- drawn buggies. Second, they deliberately choose tools that are different from those used by the outside world. This differentiation helps them maintain their unique identity, bonds their community, and ensures that they will continue to be able to accept technology on their own terms. The Amish view technologies as value-laden tools and use these tools to reinforce their values and build their community. While many scholars of technology have argued that this is the case, the Amish employ the idea in order to build the world they want to live in.

Engineering with Uncertainty: Monitoring Air Bag Performance

Modern engineering is complicated by an enormous number of uncertainties. Engineers know a great deal about the material world and how it works. But due to the inherent limits of testing and the complexities of the world outside the lab, engineers will never be able to fully predict how their creations will behave. One way the uncertainties of engineering can be dealt with is by actively monitoring technologies once they have left the development and production stage. This article uses an episode in the history of automobile air bags as an example of engineers who had the foresight and initiative to carefully track the technology on the road to discover problems as early as possible. Not only can monitoring help engineers identify problems that surface in the field, it can also assist them in their efforts to mobilize resources to resolve problem.

Introduction to special issue on science, policy and social inequity

Science and technology have been heralded as important strategies for addressing the inequities that exist in modern societies. A number of studies, however, have demonstrated that they do not always achieve this goal and in some cases they exacerbate existing, or create new, inequities. A handful of scholars have argued that the problem is not simply a result of poor attempts at implementation, but may have roots in science and technology policy. This special issue explores the opportunities for, and difficulties with, addressing inequities through science policy. Copyright , Beech Tree Publishing.

Preparing engineers for the challenges of community engagement

ABSTRACT Despite calls to address global challenges through community engagement, engineers are not formally prepared to engage with communities. Little research has been done on means to address this ‘engagement gap’ in engineering education. We examine the efficacy of an intensive, two-day Community Engagement Workshop for engineers, designed to help engineers better look beyond technology, listen to and learn from people, and empower communities. We assessed the efficacy of the workshop in a non-experimental pre–post design using a questionnaire and a concept map. Questionnaire results indicate participants came away better able to ask questions more broadly inclusive of non-technological dimensions of engineering projects. Concept map results indicate participants have a greater understanding of ways social factors shape complex material systems after completing the programme. Based on the workshop’s strengths and weaknesses, we discuss the potential of expanding and supplementing the programme to help engineers account for social aspects central to engineered systems.

An Anticipatory Social Assessment of Factory-Grown Meat

On August 5, 2013, a prototype sample of cultured, or in vitro, meat was tasted at a well-publicized event in London [1]. This hamburger was not grown in an animal, but rather from bovine stem cells in Dr. Mark Post?s laboratory at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. The event may foreshadow a day when traditional livestock production has given way to large-scale growth of meat in factories, or carneries. Dr. Post has suggested that commercialization of cultured meat could be ten to twenty years away [1]. The implications are profound. By some accounts the technology could reduce the environmental impacts of meat production [2], promote human health by eliminating harmful contents such as saturated fats and pathogens [2], address global hunger issues [3], and alleviate the ethical concerns associated with industrial livestock operations [4]. However, technologies powerful enough to address such significant challenges often come with unforseen consequences and a host of costs and benefits that seldom accrue to the same actors. In extreme cases, they can even be destabilizing to social, institutional, economic, and cultural systems [5].

Delegating to the Automobile: Experimenting with Automotive Restraints in the 1970s

This article explores the attempts in the United States in the 1970s to implement a new paradigm for automobile safety—crashworthiness, the idea that automobile passengers should be protected in the event of a crash. A large number of strategies were proposed, including air bags, seatbelt modifications, mandatory belt-use laws, and ignition interlocks. Many of these did not initially come to fruition, but they did give the automobile safety community a chance to experiment with different ways of distributing responsibilities between automobile occupants, automobile manufacturers, and, to a lesser extent, government agencies. These experiments helped pave the way for the successful implementation of a number of new strategies in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s.

ETUC Resolution on Nanotechnologies and Nanomaterials

Nanotechnologies are emerging, trans-disciplinary technologies that enable structures or objects to be designed, manipulated and manufactured on a nanometer scale, i.e., the size of a handful of atoms or molecules. At this scale, the physicochemical properties of matter can differ significantly from those obtained at larger scales. What all these technologies have in common, therefore, is to produce objects, called nanomaterials, that have new properties and behaviours that cannot be obtained easily or at all with conventional technologies.

Technical Education and Indian Society: The Role of Values

While much of this volume focuses on the role of equity in technologies, political structures, the scientific community, and economic systems, one of the most lasting ways to create a more equitable world may come through the redesign of education. This section closes with an essay by Raghubir Sharan, Yashowanta Mohapatra, and Jameson Wetmore in which they argue that engineers should receive an education in values. Values are, of course, always built into technologies and are omnipresent in systems of education. Thus the authors suggest that a more conscious attempt to consider them—by both faculty and students—is in order.