Interactive Critical Systems and How to Build Them
Harold Thimbleby · 2017
Interactive critical systems are used by people to achieve safe and reliable outcomes. When computers are involved in anything the outcomes are too often unexpected, hard to understand, and possibly dangerous or costly. How, then, should we design interactive critical systems? This chapter uses several very simple and common examples that typify the sorts of issues that also happen in more complex and larger systems. The argument is that thinking clearly helps avoid the design flaws that turn critical systems into dangerous systems. Unfortunately, just admonishing people to think clearly is not helpful: the thinking has to be multidisciplinary, it must include mathematics, and it must include human factors to help avoid and mitigate the inevitable problems that occur in design.