Over the last week, like many people, I’ve been reading and hearing numerous commentaries on what needs to be done to prevent attacks like those in New York and Washington. Some of these commentaries include calls for technological improvements to help prevent misuse of technologies that might be dangerous, including airplanes, airplane simulators, and even gene splicing equipment.
I work for a company, Rockwell Automation, that produces technology for automating industrial processes. The applications using our products can be quite dangerous, whether they are transporting large quantities of molten steel, moving continuous rolls of paper at high speed through miles of machinery, or simply moving heavy chunks of material between machining stations.
Over the years, I have developed some sense of how to make some tradeoffs of safety versus utility. This is the crux of usable design with these products:
How do we prevent mistakes with, and misuse of, potentially dangerous technologies without blocking their intended use?
As I will discuss in the coming days, preventing mistakes is often the best way to increase safety, while adding security measures often increases the probability of mistakes.
(continued in Usability and Dangerous Technology, Part 2 )
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