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 IT design 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 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.

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 a 'value lead' 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 and requirements engineering landscape. Equally it provides them with an insight into moral philosophy as far as this is relevant for sustainable, ethical and legally compliant IT design.

- an insight into technology innovation and system requirements analysis

- 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 an IT system

- the know-how to translate value principles into IT design features

- some modeling tools to support value-based engineering

- enhancement of linguistic ability

This class consists roughly of 50% lectures and 50% case study work (Übungen), all of which can be attended in person. The case study is supervised each week n class. Students are however not required to attend the case study work, but can also do it remotely by themselves and get tutor support.

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.

10% mid-term quiz

5% participation and engagement with homework case (considering case study material uploaded)

85% exam

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