UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO
FACULTY OF APPLIED SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING
APS 301
-
FINAL EXAMINATION, DECEMBER 18, 2019
EXAM TYPE: No aids permitted.
Examiner
-
W. H. Vanderburg
INSTRUCTIONS:
You must answer both questions
from Part A, and any two of the questions from Part B, for a
total of four answers. Each question is worth 25% of your final examination grade. Please use left
hand pages for planning your answers.
Answer Part A in the first examination booklet.
Answer Part B in the second examination booklet.
On the front
of
each booklet, indicate the question(s) you have answered in that booklet.
PART A (Compulsory)
Our situation may be described by the following kinds of statistics:
When the costs incurred in the production of wealth are deducted from the GDP, net
wealth production of our societies has not grown for half a century, and when calculated
according to the way this is experienced by the middle class, has declined by 40%. The
social costs imposed on the U.S. by its corporations have been estimated as equivalent to
half the GDP, which amounts to five times their profits. At one point, Blue Cross was the
largest supplier of the largest corporation in the world. Only 7% of what we extract from
the biosphere ends up in saleable products, while the rest are pollutants that must be
interpreted as products we produce but cannot sell. Following the decades after the
Second World War, the U.S. had a significant population growth and a rising standard of
living; yet the contribution technology made to the environmental crisis was larger than
those produced by population growth and rising affluence combined.
Explain how a shift away from conventional engineering approaches toward their
preventively-oriented counterparts (which would include different ways of relying on
discipline-based approaches, design exemplars, and analytical exemplars) may help to turn
our present situation around by tackling our economic, social, and environmental crises.
2. Explain how you would integrate various successful but piecemeal attempts at preventively-
oriented work redesign by corporations (including Semco and Volvo) into a comprehensive
design exemplar for the manufacture of products.
Hint: You will
be evaluated on how well you explain the reasons behind your proposal using
the four general principles outlined in class.
)
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