Session: DAC-12-01 Engineering for Global Development

Paper Number: 70595

Start Time: August 17, 03:20 PM

70595 - FMEA-Inspired Analysis for Social Impact of Engineered Products 

Social Impact has been widely discussed by the engineering community, but studies show that there is currently little systematic consideration of the social impact of products in both academia and in industry beyond social impacts on Health & Safety. This paper illustrates how FMEA style analysis can be applied to evaluating the social impact of products. The authors propose a new method titled Social Impact Effects Analysis ( SIEA ), describe how it is performed, provide an illustration/example of an SIEA, and explain the benefits of performing SIEA instead of performing a traditional FMEA.

SIEA improves upon the ability of FMEA to consider the social impacts of products by better handling impacts from multiple social impact categories, differences of impacts between stakeholders, both positive and negative impacts, products that have continuous and discrete impacts, and impacts with multiple types of uncertainty.

SIEA is an analogous method to FMEA developed to better handle these particularities. It is a systematic social impact assessment tool for utilization in product development. The goal of SIEA is to help designers consider many potential impacts of a product, rank them by importance, and determine specific actions to limit negative impacts and improve the positive impacts of products.  

Presenting Author: Andrew Armstrong Brigham Young University

Authors:

Andrew Armstrong Brigham Young University
Christopher A. Mattson Brigham Young University
John L. Salmon Brigham Young University
Eric Dahlin Brigham Young University