Systems View of Safety and Engineering Design

I'm pulling together my plan for blogposts this week, and it may prove a good capstone of the recent months' material. This weekend I caught up on the Safety Engineering portion of MITx 16.00 Introduction to Aerospace Engineering: Astronautics and Human Spaceflight.

I wasn't sure what to expect. I had dealt with software safety concerns in a previous position. Those concerns inspired me to study both IE 558: Safety Engineering and IE 577: Human Factors in Engineering. And yet I found myself disappointed, that they primarily focused on earth-based factory and office work, and barely got into the integrated (human-in-the-loop design) stories of major industrial accidents like the Union Carbide Bhopal disaster.

I was pleased to see that this MOOC takes the Systems View of Human Factors, System Safety, and Software Safety. I would encourage any engineers to connect to this MOOC just to watch the Unit 5 videos, if nothing else, because of the important discussion.

Science, History, and Systems of Systems

In Isaac Asimov's Foundation series (The Foundation Trilogy), a scientist develops a way to predict the fall of a galactic empire, and the steps that would be necessary to maintain some level of civilization. He establishes the Foundation in order to carry out his plan, with a series of timed holographic recordings to ensure that things stay on course.

In real life, the discipline that attempts to map out possible futures is called Future Studies, and one place to study it is the University of Houston. The program migrated from the University of Houston-Clear Lake to the main campus in the mid-2000s (~2005-2006).

One of the textbooks that was required for World Futures was Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. Years later, when I studied Systems of Systems through Purdue University, many of the concepts matched what I had been taught in the Future Studies classes, and particularly in Panarchy.

One of the issues with complex systems-of-systems, is that the future result is dependent upon the current state of the system.