Safety by Design

I have been teaching design engineers for many years, seeing them trying to achieve the best for their customers given the available resources. Despite the constraints, they often enjoy a freedom of choices in the early design. This is because problems often can be solved in a variety of ways, and early choices are more easily made. These choices often remain, perhaps for the full project lifecycle and sometimes with the next generation of the product. If these early decisions are not proper, there are extra costs subsequently imposed on the project. Figure 1 highlights the increasing costs for mitigations as the project advances. In other words, designers often enjoy exploring design choices in early design phases, and they have the most influence on the design of products or systems, as well as their safety.