How can you design safer and more reliable products?

2 Apply design principles

Once you have your requirements, you can apply some general design principles to create safer and more reliable products. Simplicity is key; strive to keep your design as simple as possible, and avoid unnecessary components, functions, or interactions that could increase the chances of failure or error. Additionally, break down your design into smaller, independent, and interchangeable units or modules that can be easily tested, maintained, and replaced. Redundancy is also important; include backup or alternative systems or components that can provide the same function or performance in case of failure or degradation of the primary ones. Moreover, use different types or sources of components or systems to reduce common cause failures and increase the robustness of your design. Additionally, provide clear and timely information or signals to the users or operators about the status, performance, or errors of your product and allow them to adjust or correct their actions accordingly. Finally, consider the physical, cognitive, and emotional aspects of the human users or operators of your product when designing it to fit their capabilities, limitations, and expectations.

3 Use design methods and tools

To support your design process, you can employ various methods and tools to analyze, evaluate, and improve the safety and reliability of your product. For example, failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) is a systematic technique to identify and prioritize potential failure modes, their causes and effects, as well as the actions to prevent or mitigate them. Fault tree analysis (FTA) is a graphical technique to model and quantify the probability of a specific failure event. Reliability block diagram (RBD) is a graphical technique to represent and calculate the reliability of your product. Design of experiments (DOE) is a statistical technique to plan and conduct experiments for optimizing design parameters. Lastly, design for X (DFX) is a set of guidelines or criteria to design your product with a specific focus or objective.

4 Test and validate your design

After you have completed your design, you need to test and validate it to ensure that it meets your requirements and expectations, and that it is safe and reliable. This means conducting various types of tests, such as functional tests, performance tests, stress tests, environmental tests, or user tests, to verify and evaluate the behavior, functionality, or quality of your product under different conditions or scenarios. You also need to collect and analyze the data and feedback from your tests, and use them to identify and correct any issues, defects, or errors in your design, or to make any improvements or enhancements that could increase the safety or reliability of your product.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?