PREVENTIVE ENGINEERING

Preventive approaches for the engineering, management, and regulation of modern technology distinguish themselves from their conventional counterparts by using design and decision processes that obtain the desired results while preventing or minimizing undesired effects. The term preventive engineering was coined by the author in 1989, and has since become a term of some importance in Canada.

Through the beginning of the twenty-first century, societies tended to direct technological and economic growth by means of a kind of design and decision-making that may be compared to driving a car by concentrating on its performance as indicated by the instruments on the dashboard and only occasionally glancing out to see where it is heading. The result has been many preventable "collisions" with human life, society, and the biosphere. The metaphor is appropriate because engineers, managers, and regulators make decisions whose consequences fall mostly outside of their domains of expertise, where they cannot "see" them. This leaves them little choice but to concentrate on obtaining the maximum possible desired outputs from the requisite inputs and to measure success in terms of performance values (output/input ratios such as efficiency, productivity, profitability, cost-benefit ratios, and gross domestic product [GDP]).

The result of non-preventive engineering is a system in which problems are created in every domain of specialization and left to be dealt with by other specialists in whose domain of competence they fall. In this way, an "end-of-pipe" approach has become institutionalized, making it very difficult to get to the roots of any problem, due to an intellectual and professional division of labor in every contemporary university, corporation, and government. The consequence is a labyrinth of technology: a patchwork of compensations that merely shift problems from one place to another.

It is arguable that the costs of maintaining and expanding this labyrinth are substantially undercutting gross wealth production. According to some calculations, net wealth production has been declining for decades (Daly and Cobb, 1989). It is also estimated that more than 90 percent of what the current (non-preventive) system extracts from the biosphere does not end up in salable products (Allenby and Richards 1994). The primary product would appear to be waste. Similarly, according to socio-epidemiology, workplaces have become one of the primary sources of physical and mental illness (Karasek and Theorell 1990). Unfortunately, many economic, social, and environmental policies address symptoms as opposed to root problems.

Because it has become widely recognized that most of the social and environmental consequences of any engineered product, process, or system are determined during the design phase, the present system helps to design a future society and its relations with the biosphere by omission, paying only peripheral attention to undesired consequences. Preventive approaches can turn this situation around.

Preventive approaches grew out of a study attempting to determine the extent to which the current engineering system is preventive in its orientation (Vandenburg 2000). A typical North American undergraduate engineering curriculum was examined by asking two questions: (1) How much do future practitioners learn about the way technology interacts with human life, society, and the biosphere? (2) To what extent do they learn to use this knowledge in a negative feedback mode to adjust design and decision-making to ensure that the desired results are achieved while simultaneously preventing or greatly minimizing undesired results? These questions were converted into two research instruments to score each component of every course. It was found that in the technical core, little or no reference was made to society and the biosphere, and even when there was, little or no use was made of it in a negative feedback mode. In the complementary studies component of the curriculum, little reference was made to modern science and technology, even though few aspects of modern societies are imaginable without them. Hence, students encounter some disciplines that are full of technology and little else, and others full of everything else and little technology. It is no wonder that successful design courses have been almost non-existent. This non-preventive orientation was also found in the curricula of other professions. The research also showed that the situation changed very little over the last few decades of the twentieth century.

The second phase in the study examined whether the above situation changes significantly after graduation, when practitioners enter specific areas of application (Vandenburg 2000). Using the same research instruments, the latest methods and approaches were scored in the areas of materials and production, energy, work, the urban habitat, and computer-based systems. The results showed that, except for a small cluster of methods and approaches, the same non-preventive situation prevailed. This exceptional cluster was then compared with its conventional counterparts.

The author's study made apparent that conventional approaches separate the economy of technology from the ecology of technology because they generally take the form of a two-stage approach. The economy of technology strips away all contexts (human life, society, and the biosphere), leaving only the requisite inputs and the desired outputs of a technology. From the process of converting requisite inputs into desired outputs, participating specialists abstract those aspects that are coterminous with their domains of competence. Alternatives can no longer be assessed in terms of their meaning and value for human life, society, and the biosphere because these specialists have no such knowledge. Instead, they must be assessed in terms of their contribution to the performance of the process as measured by performance values. Such accounting of outputs and inputs is essential for the effective use of scarce resources. However, it is insufficient to ensure that greater outputs are not partly or wholly achieved at the expense of human life, society, and the biosphere. In a second stage, specialists deal with undesired effects only to ensure that these are within the acceptable limits set out by applicable regulations. The two-stage process assumes that the technical and economic optimum achieved in the first stage is not made sub-optimal by the second stage. The first stage is seen as creating wealth and the second as dealing with unavoidable costs. Conventional approaches are fundamentally non-preventive and non-precautionary in their structure. They are based on the production of gross wealth, not on optimizing the creation of net wealth by subtracting social and environmental costs. Nor do they ask the question how increased wealth correlates with well-being.

In contrast, the methods and approaches receiving much higher scores in the author's study integrate these two stages by adjusting design and decision-making to obtain the desired results while preventing, as much as possible, the undesired ones. These come closer to the way one normally drives a car, by looking out the windows and occasionally glancing at the dashboard. They are equipped with negative feedback regarding their consequences, while conventional approaches are not.

From this comparative study emerged a prescription based on the concept of preventive approaches. In 2002, the Canada Foundation for Innovation recognized this concept as one of twenty-five important recent innovations.

WILLEM H. VANDERBURG

SEE ALSO Engineering Ethics.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Allenby, Braden R., and Deanna J. Richards. (1994). "Introduction." In The Greening of Industrial Ecosystems, eds. Braden R. Allenby and Deanna J. Richards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

Daly, Herman E., and John B. Cobb, Jr. (1989). For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future. Boston: Beacon Press.

Downey, James, and Lois Claxton, eds. (2002). Inno' Va - Tion: Essays By Leading Canadian Researchers. Toronto: Key Porter Books.

Karasek, Robert, and ?öres Theorell. (1990). Healthy Work: Stress, Productivity, and the Reconstruction of Working Life. New York: Basic Books.

Vanderburg, Willem H. (2000). The Labyrinth of Technology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.