Social impact has been widely discussed by the engineering community, but studies show that there is currently little systematic consideration of the social impact of products in both academia and in industry beyond social impacts on health and safety. While Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) is useful for evaluating health and safety risks, new developments are needed to create an FMEA-style evaluation that can be applied to a wide range of social impacts for engineered products. The authors describe necessary modifications to traditional FMEA that transform it into a tool for social impact analysis. The modification of FMEA involves the introduction of positive and negative impacts, the inclusion of discrete and continuous impacts, the consideration of various stakeholder types, and the inclusion of uncertainty in place of detectability. This modified FMEA is referred to in this paper as Social Impact Effects Analysis (SIEA). The paper describes how SIEA is performed and articulates the potential benefits of SIEA.
