Safe-by-Design

Safe-by-Design: from Safety to Responsibility

van de Poel, I.R. (TU Delft Values Technology and Innovation)
Robaey, Z.H. (TU Delft BT/Biotechnology and Society)

Values Technology and Innovation

2017

Safe-by-design (SbD) aims at addressing safety issues already during the R&D and design phases of new technologies. SbD has increasingly become popular in the last few years for addressing the risks of emerging technologies like nanotechnology and synthetic biology. We ask to what extent SbD approaches can deal with uncertainty, in particular with indeterminacy, i.e., the fact that the actual safety of a technology depends on the behavior of actors in the value chain like users and operators. We argue that while indeterminacy may be approached by designing out users as much as possible in attaining safety, this is often not a good strategy. It will not only make it more difficult to deal with unexpected risks; it also misses out on the resources that users (and others) can bring for achieving safety, and it is undemocratic. We argue that rather than directly designing for safety, it is better to design for the responsibility for safety, i.e., designers should think where the responsibility for safety is best situated and design technologies accordingly. We propose some heuristics that can be used in deciding how to share and distribute responsibility for safety through design.

Design
Ethics
Indeterminacy
Nanotechnology
Responsibility
Risk
Safe-by-design
Safety
Safety engineering
SbD
Synthetic biology
Uncertainty
Users

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fedfd363-9894-4d65-ac47-75a40a0ccca9

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11569-017-0301-x

1871-4757

NanoEthics: ethics for technologies that converge at the nanoscale, 1-10

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2017 I.R. van de Poel, Z.H. Robaey