What happens when operators misunderstand the design and designers misunderstand the operators?
Couple of partial extracts from Busby & Hibberd’s 2002 article which explored accident report sources to construct mismatches between operator and designer assumptions.
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Extracts:
· Designers may assume procedures can compensate for hazardous designs, e.g. “The belief that operating procedures can avoid a harm that is inherent in the design, whereas procedures may be too general and are often violated”
· Designers assume operators will maintain attention, “The belief that operators will sustain high attention levels, whereas attention is degraded in a variety of conditions”
· Assumption from designers that “operators will have good experiential knowledge about a system’s limit states”
· Operators may place excessive confidence in safety systems, eg “The system and its safety devices work perfectly”, with the misconception being that “precautionary systems perform perfectly, perfectly reliably”
· Operators assume that “all that needs to be known is contained in procedures”
· Operators’ misconception that “The past is a good guide to the future [and that] past strategies can be reused if no contrary indication”
Ref: Busby, J. S., & Hibberd, R. E. (2002). Mutual misconceptions between designers and operators of hazardous systems: JS Busby: Mutual misconceptions between designers and operators. Research in Engineering Design, 13(3), 132-138.
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