Designing Safety Critical Interactions: Hunting Down Human Error

Human error at the time of operation (i.e. when the system is in use) are implicated in most incidents involving safety critical systems.. In many domains, control and command interfaces are composed of a multitude of devices and machines from different brands in different generations have been crammed together. The resultant bridging of functions across devices, the decision making, the overview, the handling of partially imprecise or conflicting information are often just offloaded to the human. Thus, there appears to be a need to shift the attention from avoiding human error (at operation time) to avoiding error during design. In this workshop, we aim to provide a forum to discuss such a paradigm shift and the implication on the methods and tools for designing and evaluating HCI technology in safety-critical environments