Social Responsibility, Human Centred Systems and Engineering Ethics

Praxis is defined in the Cambridge English Dictionary as "the process of using a theory or knowledge in a practical way. Michael Cooley was one of the founding members of the Human Centered Systems(HCS) movement where human tacit knowledge is valorized and the human is empowered with technology and automation at the service of, and controlled by, the human. This paper proposes a set of ethical guidelines, in the form of a Manifesto, for a systems engineering design praxis. The rationale is to detach from "the one best way"that the Agile Software Development process has become, to value tacit knowledge by giving the client the right to reject, to rebalance power from the designer to the client and to slow down or depressurize the development process. This Manifesto emerges from the ongoing work on the digitization of the Cooley Collection by the interdisciplinary team members of the Insyte-Cooley Research Lab in the Luke Wadding Library of Waterford Institute of Technology. Work on this manifesto has raised serious questions - is the systems design process that involves interdisciplinary teams, responsible design and development of non commercial but socially beneficial systems, a very different and emergent model? Is it compatible with, a very different design approach? An ideology is presented, from which, as the lab progresses a supporting methodology specific to complex digital cultural heritage systems is evolving.