Case Studies
As a start, take a look at one or more of the following cases:
Tacoma Narrows Bridge
Silver Bridge
Space Shuttle Challenger disaster
Now relate the events to our ethical principles, and think about how the engineers could’ve detected and prevented those incidents. When appropriate, also ask yourself if they could’ve employed our problem solving guidelines.
If you’re interested in the technical details or an expert’s perspective, read this report by the IEEE.
For more breadth and possibilities, we’ve listed links below for case studies organized by category and collected by Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. Since such good and applicable material is already published online, we would like to point you to it and not, as software engineers would say, “reinvent the wheel”.
Note: Some of the entries within a category might also appear in another category because they are applicable in both.