DRONE GAME THAT HIGHLIGHTS ETHICAL AND SUSTAINABILITY IMPLICATIONS OF DESIGN DECISIONS

This paper reports on the development of a brief scenario-based challenge to prompt engineering students’ reflection about the broader impacts of their design decisions, and thereby increase their ethical sensitivity and motivation. The game scenario asks players to design a drone for ornithologists to study birds, contextualized as part of a university course. Constrained by their budget, players choose a subset from a variety of actions that can advance their drone design. Each action, for example spending a week prototyping in the lab (200€) or making a one-day field trip with the ornithologists (1000€), allows the players to access specific information and make choices to refine their design. Presenting the task as a mechanical engineering design problem, without reference to ethics or sustainability, gives us a window into how students spontaneously include these aspects in their design decisions. This is important, as previous studies have shown that engineers typically interpret their brief as restricted only to their core engineering disciplinary expertise and do not perceive the ethical implications of their design decisions. The feedback that participants receive after submitting their final prototype highlights potential ethical and environmental issues, with a view to increasing both students’ ethical sensitivity (recognising that an ethical concern exists) and ethical motivation (internal drive towards behaviours coherent with ethical values). This paper reports on the scenario development and first implementation as an online game that constitute the semester project of the second author. We share preliminary participant feedback and our plans for a tangible interface with tabletop robots to observe participants’ decision-making processes through haptic functionality and afford opportunities to integrate peer discussions in the activity.