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Ethical conduct of research:
When researching possible solutions or solutions that may already exist, our team must ensure the following are to be accounted for in regards to the wide range of users.
Different age groups: The trail is used by many different age groups. During our visit to the trail, we encountered children, teens, adults, and seniors. All these age groups have a different view of the trail and different opinions, needs, and expectations of the trail. In order to be able to target the interests of the majority of the users of the trail, we must conduct user observations of all age groups.
Different professions: Civil engineers may have a certain view of what a perfect solution may be to fix drainage problems than other people. Since none of the team members are civil engineering majors, nor have we completed study in our own fields, we must recognize our ignorance of the subject and make use of a combination of learning techniques to glean a better understanding of the problem from the perspective of a civil engineer. This will include consulting a civil engineer expert witness as well as conducting ample secondary research regarding standards and regulations pertaining to design solutions.
Different uses of the trail: The trail is used for a few activities such as walking, running, and biking. Users using the trail for these activities may find some components to our future solution useful or not so useful. Making sure the users of these activities are pleased is key to making the trail seem beautiful to all users. Having a bike lane, for example, will be pleasing for all users as bikers won’t need to dodge runners or walkers and can have a smooth ride. Runners and walkers can continue their activities without the worry of having bikers get in their way. Although the trail may be misused by its users–such as runners and walkers entering the bike lane and bikers entering the pedestrian lane, in this example–the team must perform due diligence in focusing on controlling what can be done physically in the name of safety and usability of the trail, rather than the uncontrollable behaviors of users.
User Privacy:
While conducting user observations and interviews, our team must make sure all parties are aware of what is being asked and are given background to why questions are being asked. Our team must introduce ourselves to the users to form a sense of trust and it will be up to the user’s decision if they would like to introduce themselves to us. Our team must let the users know what kind of information will be released in our report and will make sure to let the users know that we will not disclose any personal information to the public such as name. Responses will remain anonymous in the final report.
Safety concerns:
Design to fix the path should be so that the path is even to avoid large puddles from forming again and avoid injury when biking, walking, or running.
Design of the drainage system must allow water to flow and not gather to avoid water becoming a breeding place for infectious microorganisms and insects such as mosquitos.
Design for the underpass must be such that it prevents graffiti writing on underpass walls which would give people a place to write harmful words or images.
Limitations:
There are five main limitations to our design:
Accommodating the interests of residents along the GBT, whose opinions will dictate the success of the design solution and will ultimately determine the fate of its implementation.
Maintaining as efficient of a budget as possible, while also conforming to the precedent set by Glencoe’s restoration of the trail, in order to produce a feasible solution which will benefit the users of the GBT and its surrounding communities.
Preserving the beauty and health of the native species within the trail.
The time constraints of the class, which will ultimately dictate the amount of research, development, and testing which may be completed in advance of the design solution.
The location constraint, which limits the team’s exposure to the GBT and ultimately impacts the extent of user testing and observation.
3 primary ethical concerns:
By splitting the project amongst two teams, our team may become too focused on a single objective. This could cause us to overlook problems that become apparent along the way, or ignore a concern of our project partners. It is also important to be mindful of what affects our decisions will have on the implementation of the other team, as well as understanding what implications the other team’s decisions may have on our solution.
Communicating often and thoroughly with the other team, as well as our project partners, will allow us to stay mindful of the scope of our project, and not get tunnel vision.
We have come to the conclusion that we will be focusing on the hardscape aspects of the trail. This means we will focus on the drainage issues and the underpasses of the trail.
We are concerned that we may not have much skills necessary to complete this project given our different majors. The project document explained that this project would be well fitted for civil and environmental engineers. None of us are majoring in those fields.
We have gotten in contact with a civil engineer and are planning to have discussions and interviews about how to tackle certain issues. We will be mindful to frame this partnership in a way to avoid the engineer completing the project himself.
We are concerned that what we may consider "perfect" or "good" may not be what residents of Winnetka want or see as good. If our team is not mindful, we could make a change to the trail that would negatively impact the local residents.
We will be having communication with our partners and hopefully members of the Winnetka community that are willing to help us through the process to know what it is that will make the neighbors happy but also make the trail look better.
Interviews will include local residents who live along their trail to include their thoughts and opinions.
Criteria for determining priority of concerns:
Figure 31: Concern Priority table.
Reasoning for criteria: We wanted to address concerns that seemed to be the toughest and most important. Coincidentally, they were already numbered based on how important we thought each concern was. The concern with the most checked boxes is the one we consider to be top priority based on whether it is based on something our project partners see as important or have directly addressed them. Since the many issues with the trail were discussed in the project description and directly discussed by our project partners, that is our top concern that we want to address in order to not be too focussed on one single issue. The fact that the description also said that civil engineers and environmental engineers will be highly interested in this project also made it concerning. Even after visiting the trail, it was concerning that none of the team members were specializing in environmental nor civil engineering. But we have talks with a civil engineer coming up so we ranked it number two in priority. Finally, the concern of keeping residents happy with any changes came up way after our trip to GBT and seemed easy to address so we ranked it last but it is still a concern we have that needs a bit of thought.
Discussion Board Summary:
The discussion board reinforced our chosen primary ethical concerns and our approaches to remediate them. Responses indicated that it was good that we identified our own limitations due to our majors not being in civil engineering and that reaching out to a civil engineer for an expert opinion on the project. They also indicated that taking into account the satisfaction of residents is very important. Advice we took into consideration includes concerns about the satisfaction of residents as well as managing the scope of the project.
There were concerns about how to gauge the level of resident satisfaction, especially given that an overwhelming consensus one way or another will be hard to achieve. We saw this as a very important concern, and to remedy this, we intend to make use of questionnaires to keep the residents’ views in mind at all times. We chose to take these concerns into consideration because the inability to simultaneously satisfy all residents is an unavoidable phenomenon, and to best address this ethical concern would be to democratize the views of the residents through simple majority within the questionnaire.
There were conflicting opinions on how we should address the ethical concern of the large scope of the problem; some individuals expressed that it would be alright to focus on one part of the problem at hand, as the scope of the project was too large to expect a comprehensive solution, while others expressed that our original approach of broadly tackling the problem was the best way to address the ethical concern. We considered both opinions on this ethical concern and decided upon a middle-of-the-road approach to remediating it: we will focus on the hardscape component of the design problem, however, we will address multiple concerns of the trail with regards to the hardscape aspect. This will allow us to take on a holistic approach to the design problem, while also allowing us the capacity for exceptional, well researched solutions. Due to the nature of the design project, wherein the team is responsible for offering a plan and suggestions to our project partners, rather than the implementation of the design, the ethical concern of the scope of the project may not be given the same priority as the ethical concerns pertaining to the team’s inexperience and the impact of the design solution on residents.
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