Design for Safety

Perhaps an appropriate starting point for a paper entitled ‘Design for Safety’ is to define what we mean by ‘design’ and to see how considerations of ‘safety’ are likely to affect this task. According to the STARTS Guide [STARTS 1987] the design process may be divided into four distinct activities: abstraction: the operation of generalising, of identifying the essentials; decomposition: the process of reducing an object into a number of simpler, smaller parts; analysis of interactions, interfaces and structures; modularization; elaboration: the operation of detailing, adding features; decision making: identification and selection of alternative strategies.