Stephanie Balters

Decision-making in engineering - a call for affective engineering dimensions in applied engineering design and design sciences

This paper counters the prevalent cognitive engineering decision-making paradigm by introducing fundamental and hitherto unaccounted results from neuroscience into the discussion: firstly decision-making is a process that is influenced by emotional (somatic marker) signals, secondly regulation of emotion is essential for rational decision-making, and thirdly decisions are made on subconscious level before we become consciously aware. These insights have a potentially tremendous impact onto how we model and incorporate decision-making in engineering sciences. Thus, the authors believe that it is high time to research and develop affective engineering dimensions. Hence inspired by new insights from neuroscience, we are calling to reconsider the rational and conscious decision-making foundation of modem engineering by posing a new hypothesis: Engineering decisions are per se non-rational and/or unconscious.