"It's the Seeing and Feeling": How Embodied and Conceptual Knowledges Relate in Pipeline Engineering Work.

This paper examines the relationship between conceptual and embodied reasoning in engineering work. In the last decade across multiple research projects on pipeline engineering, we have observed only a few times when engineers have expressed embodied or sensory aspects of their practice, as if the activity itself is disembodied. Yet, they also often speak about the importance of field experience. In this paper, we look at engineers' accounts of the value of field experience showing how it works on their sense of what the technology that they are designing looks, feels, and sounds like in practice, and so what this means for construction and operation, and the management of risk. We show how office-based pipeline engineering work is an exercise in embodied imagination that humanizes the socio-technical system as it manifests in the technical artifacts that they work with. Engineers take the role of the other to reason through the practicability of their designs and risk acceptability.

When Ethics is a Technical Matter: Engineers' Strategic Appeal to Ethical Considerations in Advocating for System Integrity.

Situated in critiques of the "moral muteness" of technical rationality, we examine concepts of ethics and the avoidance of ethical language among Australian gas pipeline engineers. We identify the domains in which they saw ethics as operating, including public safety, environmental protection, sustainability, commercial probity, and modern slavery. Particularly with respect to ethical matters that bear on public safety, in the course of design and operational activities, engineers principally advocated for action using technical language, avoiding reference to potential consequences such as death or destruction of property. Within their organizations, they saw themselves as occupying a technical "line of defense". We argue that this focus on technical language is action-oriented. Ethics tells practitioners of unacceptable outcomes, but it does not guide them in what they need to do to avoid that outcome in practice. We observed some cases where engineers had not made the connection between their role and ethics in the sense of public safety. We argue that muteness on ethical matters can obscure the nature of the risk where technical advice is being taken on by non-technical actors, and where technical actors themselves do not have a clear sense of their public safety obligations.