Causation, Liability and Toxic Risk Exposure

ABSTRACT Persons injured as a result of exposure to toxic or carcinogenic substances are seldom able to recover damages from those who are responsible for the exposure. Tort law requires proof of causation, and causation is often unprovable because of long latency periods, because of the relative infrequency of the injuries and because many of the injuries among the exposed population are the result of other factors. A number of proposals for modifying the legal causation requirement to allow those who create hazardous risks to be held liable for the injuries that materialise are considered and found inadequate. A proposal to treat risk exposure itself as an injury for which compensation under private law is possible is also considered and ultimately found incoherent. The paper concludes by arguing for a public law solution, modelled on criminal law, but providing compensation for victims.     

Ways of Knowing: The Creative Process and the Design of Technology

ABSTRACT This paper draws upon the already extensive epistemology of science, both to provide a yardstick of comparison for the emergent epistemology of design, and to establish some starting points from which we might begin to construct the epistemology of design.
In approaching the problem of how designers design, the paper employs Heidegger's distinction between 'know-how'and 'knowledge-that', popularised by Ryle, and shows it to be central to the distinction between the implicit processes of design employed by craft technologies, and the explicit processes employed by modern scientific technology. Borrowing from recent work by post-structuralists, it explores the nature of the phases of analysis or 'deconstruction', synthesis or construction, and evaluation, by which scientifically informed design is supposed to proceed, paying particular attention to the relationship between deconstructive analysis and constructive synthesis, in order to re-construct the creative moment/movement by which designers 'leap' from problem to solution.     

Group Composition,Creative Synergy,and Group Performance

Organizations use groups to improve performance on tasks that require problem solving. Is this belief in the problem solving benefits of groups misplaced given the process-losses often experienced by brainstorming groups? This study of 94 intact autonomous work groups performing multi-part tasks revealed that group creative performance increased multiplicatively (exponentially) with the number of highly creative group members composing the group. However, this occurred only when Team Creativity-Relevant Processes (TCRP) within the group were relatively high. When TCRP were relatively low, group creative performance decreased multiplicatively with the number of highly creative group members within it. When TCRP were about average for the sample, group performance increased only linearly with the number of highly creative members within a group.