On the importance of designing safe-to-fail systems.
A beautiful reflection from one of the GOATs in public safety – William Haddon Jr, about how dying for a moment of distraction, due to largely design matters, is
“too high a penalty to pay for being human”.
This comes from an upcoming summary of a 1993 article which explored the ‘landmark’ discovery from Haddon and Gibson around the essential role of injury: the exchange of energy that exceeds the bodies threshold.
A simple idea now – but one that was utterly profound for its time, and said to have rapidly improved road and patient safety, among other areas.
Summary prob next week (extract from Guarnieri, 1992, Journal of Safety Research)
SafetyInsights.org 