Print Email Facebook Twitter Failure of Engineering Artifacts: A Life Cycle Approach Title Failure of Engineering Artifacts: A Life Cycle Approach Author Del Frate, L. Faculty Technology, Policy and Management Department Values and Technology Date 2012-03-03 Abstract Failure is a central notion both in ethics of engineering and in engineering practice. Engineers devote considerable resources to assure their products will not fail and considerable progress has been made in the development of tools and methods for understanding and avoiding failure. Engineering ethics, on the other hand, is concerned with the moral and social aspects related to the causes and consequences of technological failures. But what is meant by failure, and what does it mean that a failure has occurred? The subject of this paper is how engineers use and define this notion. Although a traditional definition of failure can be identified that is shared by a large part of the engineering community, the literature shows that engineers are willing to consider as failures also events and circumstance that are at odds with this traditional definition. These cases violate one or more of three assumptions made by the traditional approach to failure. An alternative approach, inspired by the notion of product life cycle, is proposed which dispenses with these assumptions. Besides being able to address the traditional cases of failure, it can deal successfully with the problematic cases. The adoption of a life cycle perspective allows the introduction of a clearer notion of failure and allows a classification of failure phenomena that takes into account the roles of stakeholders involved in the various stages of a product life cycle. Subject failurelife cyclefailure analysisproduct developmentfailure trajectorysustainability To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:020f5323-d93f-47da-bef5-fb43944646be DOI https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-012-9360-0 Publisher Springer ISSN 1353-3452 Source Science and Engineering Ethics, 19 (3), 2013 Part of collection Institutional Repository Document type journal article Rights (c) 2012 The Author(s)This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Files PDF delFrate_2012.pdf 424.51 KB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:020f5323-d93f-47da-bef5-fb43944646be/datastream/OBJ/view