Engineering is very much concerned with values. By this I mean engineering values, such as the value of a mathemati- cal constant like pi, the strength of a piece of steel or the hardness of ceramic material.

Engineers know that these numbers are important.

But there are other types of values and these are the human values of life.

Way back in the days of the ancient Greeks, Plato powerfully argued in favour of the objectivity of values. By this he meant that things like the concept of truth were universal. He also debated other concepts, such as ‘good’ and ‘beauty’.

But other philosophers postulated that values were relative. The relativists said that values related to a person’s culture, social standing and so on.
One of the earliest relativists was Protagoras (c490–420 BCE) and his book, Truth, contains his most famous statement: “Humans are the measure of all things.”

The Plato position and the Protagoras position have been argued ever since the two first postulated their positions. When I give lectures at business schools, I talk of “time invariant morality” and “time variant morality”.

The time invariant morality is something like murder or theft. Murder and theft have always been considered wrong, and always will be.

In contrast, one can consider time variant morality. An example is that, in Victorian times, ladies did not show any bare leg in public. It was considered improper. But times have changed and, in most cultures today, ladies showing bare leg in public is quite acceptable.

So, how does this relate to engineering? Well, engineering changes with the times. Architecture changes. For example, open-plan office layouts have been popular for years but, before that, it was considered only correct for each person to have his or her own personal office space.

So, engineering design today can be required to design structures for vast open-plan space, which would not have been ‘on the drawing board’ some decades ago.

Engineers now have to design with occupa- tional health and safety legislation in mind. Working spaces and conditions that may have been quite acceptable some decades ago are now not acceptable at all.

The same applies to concepts like Reliability Avail- ability and Main- tainability, or RAM. How easily and rapidly can one change parts? How often will the device break down? These aspects are now matters of opinion and decision. The value of pi will never change, but the expectation of how rapidly one can change a damaged part will.

As the rate of technology advance accelerates, so too does one’s ability to make engineering decisions based more on what one wants to happen. So, human opinion and human values can be designed into the devices of today.

This means, more and more, that engineering as a science of society has to take value considerations into account. Engineering is no longer only a ‘hard’ science, governed only by the fixed laws of nature, such as gravity and electrical force. We now have to pay much more attention to human value and personal expectations, which can be an intentional input to design from the outset.

It is interesting to ponder just how far all this evolved.