Safety Critical Products
Serious performance
Safety critical products are serious products that deliver serious performance. They must be robust, reliable and intuitive. Lives depend on it.
These products are normally used in dangerous, uncomfortable or challenging environments where the user’s stress levels can be high. Their use must be straightforward and self-explanatory. Their design must demonstrate an inherent fitness for purpose, instilling the user with a sense of confidence.
Regulations and approvals
Safety critical products by their nature are often heavily regulated. Our development approach seeks to deconstruct these regulations at the outset to extract clear measurable design requirements.
These requirements help us to highlight the key risks in the project, which in turn determine how we plan and manage the development programme. The resulting project plan will prioritise focused risk mitigation activities early in the programme and will incorporate sufficient time for the regulatory testing and approval of representative manufactured products ahead of the market launch.
Extracting requirements and planning for approval
Managing development risk
A balanced use of theoretical analysis and focused rig building and testing is central to the successful management of product development risk.
Tackling design risks as early as possible in the development cycle improves the probability of a successful development outcome.
Wearable safety products
Many personal protection and safety products are worn on the body. They must be comfortable, easy to don and remove, and they need to look cool so that your target users want to put them on and be seen wearing them. Protection equipment that no one wears protects no one.
Developing wearable products for a global market increases the ergonomic and cultural challenges that need to be addressed. We will need to develop products that are comfortable for a highly diverse range of worldwide users to wear irrespective of their gender, stature or physique and that aligns with social, ethnic and cultural norms in all your geographical target markets.
Ease of use
Safety products are an amalgamation of operations and individual features, where high efficacy is paramount. Typically used in stressful or hazardous situations, often by occasional or even first-time users, safety products should be simple and intuitive to use and should reassuringly deliver the expected performance in a highly predictable manner.
Using system-based task analysis and error evaluation helps us to ensure that all the product interactions are unambiguous and clearly conveyed to the user. Using these tools in combination with practical user testing, we developed a new ergonomic handle system for the Chubb FX extinguishers which means they are 30% faster to prime and deploy than traditional extinguisher designs - a significant saving that could be the difference between life and death.
Featured
World class expertise founded on 60+ years of experience
