Safety Through Design: The State of the Art in Safety Processes

The way safety is addressed in product and process design is changing. Safety is increasingly being addressed through design rather than an add-on effort after the design is complete. This approach, called safety through design or design safety, relies heavily on engineering controls rather than behavior interventions.

This paper examines the emerging interest in the design safety process including six key forces pushing safety through design: costs, competition, legal requirements, international influences, risk assessment advances and the Institute for Safety Through Design (ISTD). This paper briefly reviews some of the more familiar techniques such as the Preliminary Hazards Analysis (PHA), Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), and Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA). Greater discussion is devoted to the emergence of task-based risk assessments and tools for implementing safety through design.