ABSTRACT

Faced with competing stakeholder interests, the uncertainty of predicting outcomes of design and the demands of working in a competitive marketplace, the designer must find ways to balance these concerns with the ethical obligations of his or her profession. The concept of the standard of care provides working professionals with some measure of how their decisions and work might be evaluated and assures them that should it be necessary, aside from negligence, an evaluation of their work would be compared with what their reasonable knowledgeable peers might do in similar circumstances. The standard of care then becomes the process by which prudence and risk in design are assessed.