This transdisciplinary course teaches students the essential elements of a Value-based Engineering for sustainable IT system design. Value-based Engineering is an “Ethics-by-Design” methodology allowing companies to understand the social implications of their IT Innovations and to pin down the true human challenges arising from their business for direct as well as indirect stakeholders.

Value-based Engineering as taught in this course helps companies’ innovation and engineering teams to formulate an ethically aligned value strategy for their business as well as their IT infrastructure. Concrete approaches for the identification of technical and organizational system design requirements are presented and applied in class in the form of a case-study exercise and homework.

The goal of the course as a whole is to give students a first theoretical as well as practical grasp of what it would mean to become an innovation ‘value-expert’ for IT-driven companies.  In this vein, the course sets the scene by teaching students first about the wider context of Value-based Engineering in today’s innovation management landscape. Equally it provides them with an insight into the philosophical underpinnings of value-theory and moral philosophy as far as this is relevant for the professional engagement in Value-based Engineering.

- a deep insight into today's technology innovation space

- an understanding of human and social values and their ontology

- the skill to explore values with the help of ethical theories and derive a proper value proposition for a company

- the know-how to translate value principles into engineering practice

- some modeling tools to support value-based engineering

- enhancement of linguistic ability

Students are required to attend ideally all lecture meetings taking place for this class.

This course is done in a flip-teaching mode. So students are coming to class in a prepared way: They need to watch the lecture upfront online and receive a script for it. Alternatively, they may listen to the lecture in podcast-format. Students come to class in order to deepen the lecture material through in-class exercises and discussions. The in-class exercises and feedbacks are essential to do well in the exam.

5% involvement and active participation in class

45% homework

50% exam

Please log in with your WU account to use all functionalities of read!t. For off-campus access to our licensed electronic resources, remember to activate your VPN connection connection. In case you encounter any technical problems or have questions regarding read!t, please feel free to contact the library at readinglists@wu.ac.at.

office hours on appointment, please contact mis-sek@wu.ac.at