A Brief Note On Safety And Accident Prevention

During the course of this semester, we have studied a number of different topics related to human factors. These topics have ranged from stress factors and safety, to display types and control systems. All of these ideas and concepts play a role on our everyday lives and most of the time we wouldn’t even think about them in the design process. Especially when in the 21st century all that matters is making products cutting edge and breathtaking. But none of this matters when a user sits in a chair for less than thirty minutes and is uncomfortable. In this paper I am going to focus on two of the topics that I found most interesting: Safety and Automation. I am going to describe the major concepts, give examples of them, relate them to the real world and design, and then speak about the significance of them.

The first topic that I want to analyze is “Safety and Accident Prevention”. Safety has been a major goal of enhancement in human factors. We want to increase the safety of people in many different environments, not just at work. One major concept in safety is legislation. These legislations are made to keep people safe even if it means reducing productivity and increasing costs. The first major safety agency was the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, also known as OSHA. OSHA was founded in 1970 after a fire in New York’s garment district that killed over 146 people in under 15 minutes. Because of this horrific accident, the Occupational Safety and Health Act was passed to impose certain safety standards on industries. OSHA has a variety of jobs including implementing safety programs, setting and revoking health and safety standards, conducting inspection, investigating problems, issuing citations, petitioning the co...

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...en burns by coffee that she didn’t know was hot. And now every cup of coffee served by McDonalds contains that warning. That however is just one example of a warning label. Warning labels must include four parts of information: A signal word conveying seriousness, a description of the hazard, consequences associated with the hazard, and behavior needed to avoid the hazard. The signal word should be either danger, warning, or caution, with danger being used with warnings that would likely result in severe injury or death, and caution being used for actions that could result in minor personal injury. The company needs to decide what signal word they need for their warning. It has been found that consumers have difficulty in differentiating between the signal words, and so engineers commonly put more information than is necessary on the label to increase comprehension.