Public defence in Design, MA Hanna Koskinen

MA Hanna Koskinen will defend the thesis "User involvement in safety-critical system design" on 17 March 2023 at 12:00 in Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Design, in lecture hall A215, Otakaari 1, Espoo.

Opponent: Prof. Pascal Béguin, Université de Lyon, France
Custos: Prof. Turkka Keinonen, Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, Department of Design

Thesis available for public display 10 days prior to the defence at: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/doc_public/eonly/riiputus/
Doctoral theses in the School of Arts, Design and Architecture: https://aaltodoc.aalto.fi/handle/123456789/54

Public defence announcement:

Designing tools for performing safety-critical work tasks is demanding design engineering discipline. Numerous highly specialized skills and knowledge needs to be integrated to create a well-functioning solution that appropriately serves carrying out the work and fulfilling the goals of the activity. Consequently, representing a considerable collaboration challenge to the design process.

Expert users (e.g., operators) are a group of specialists that could potentially contribute much to developing the appropriate solutions. Many industrial guidelines also demand acknowledging the user perspective in design. However, the expert users' role in the context of safety-critical design, have conventionally been restricted to involving the users in the evaluation phase in which the new design is assessed regarding its functionality and usability. At the same time, at this later stage, there may only be remote possibilities to make any radical changes to the design regarding the identified needs by the users. Yet, the tools are an integral part of the safety-critical system and from the overall safety perspective, it is highly relevant how the expert users operative master their tools. Therefore, this thesis aims to promote early expert user involvement in design of safety-critical systems and thus enable better inclusion of their hands-on experience and wealth of operative knowledge in design.

This thesis presents the development of a method which may facilitate participative processes and enable involving the expert users in safety-critical system design. The functional modelling of Tools-in-Use (TiU) is introduced to facilitate constructive designer-user interaction and discussion about the different aspects of the emerging design solution. Within the TiU model both the functional content of work (the core task) and the design solution (regarding to its concept and the interface levels) are explicated. The TiU model provides, in a condensed form, a demonstration of how the different characteristics of the design solution may contribute to achieving the objectives of the activity. In addition, the model emphasises the meaning of understanding the work activity as a basis for forming the design rationale.

The contribution this thesis makes is in the intersection of the fields of human factors and ergonomics, human-centred design and usability engineering. The empirical work has been conducted in several safety-critical work domains.

Contact information of doctoral candidate: