Fifty-Five Prompt Questions for Identifying Social Impacts of Engineered Products

Abstract

Abstract This article introduces 55 prompt questions that can be used by design teams to consider the social impacts of the engineered products they develop. These 55 questions were developed by a team of engineers and social scientists to help design teams consider the wide range of social impacts that can result from their design decisions. After their development, these 55 questions were tested in a controlled experiment involving 12 design teams. Given a 1-h period of time, 6 control teams were asked to identify many social impacts within each of the 11 social impact categories identified by Rainock et al. (2018, The Social Impacts of Products: A Review, Impact Assess. Project Appraisal, 36, pp. 230241), while 6 treatment groups were asked to do the same while using the 55 questions as prompts to the ideation session. Considering all 1079 social impacts identified by the teams combined and using 99% confidence intervals, the analysis of the data shows that the 55 questions cause teams to more evenly identify high-quality, high-variety, high-novelty impacts across all 11 social impact categories during an ideation session, as opposed to focusing too heavily on a subset of impact categories. The questions (treatment) do this without reducing the quantity, quality, or novelty of impacts identified, compared to the control group. In addition, using a 90% confidence interval, the 55 questions cause teams to more evenly identify impacts when low quality, low variety, and low novelty are not filtered out. As a point of interest, the case where low quality and low variety impacts are removed – but low novelty impacts are not – the treatment draws the same conclusion but with only 85% confidence.