Safety-Critical Design

Namahn designs Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs) for safety-critical systems. Well-designed HMIs contribute to productivity and resilience.

Safety-critical systems are characterized by:

• A risk of serious damage to the environment or loss of life (e.g. systems used in the control room of a power plant)
• Complex tasks performed by expert users (e.g. systems used in surgery)
• Operator control over equipment or people (e.g. on an airplane's flight deck)
• Performance under time pressure (e.g. in emergency response).

Typical domains in which safety-critical systems occur are process control, (e.g. nuclear power plants), transportation (e.g. air traffic control, railway signaling, intelligent transport systems), medical applications (e.g. operating theaters, diagnostic and treatment devices) and emergency management. Safety-Critical Design is rooted in the fields of Human Factors and Ergonomics, the precursors of Interaction Design.

In order to address the specificities of Safety-Critical Design, at Namahn, we:

• Study the socio-technical context of the system (ethnomethodological field studies)
• Analyze the cognitive aspects and information needs of complex tasks (cognitive task analysis, link analysis)
• Elicit and design a (shared) mental model to support distributed cognition
• Develop patterns of interaction that enhance situation awareness
• Aim at increasing the resilience of the system as a whole
• Perform a risk analysis to determine which risks can be tolerated, mitigated, eliminated or transferred.

Typical requests from our clients are:

• Redesign an existing application in order to enhance safety and efficiency of use through an optimal fit of the system to the human capabilities of the users.
• Assist in a major re-organization of a complex and safety-critical work environment.
• Design the interface for a new application, where the operators' task performance must be highly efficient.

Namahn maintains a network of internationally renowned experts and academics in the area of safety-critical systems design, through invitations for lectures and project-based consultancy services.

We also initiate or participate in research projects.

Namahn regularly contributes to targeted conferences or workshops related to safety-critical systems design (e.g.: HCP08 workshop on Supervisory Control in Critical Systems Management; The Working conference on Human Error, Safety and Systems Development (HESSD-2009).

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES) is an international society whose mission is to promote the discovery and exchange of knowledge concerning the characteristics of human beings that are applicable to the design of systems and devices of all kinds.