Since the emergence of the human factors profession following World War II, the concept of a design-induced error has been recognized. In 1967 the NTSB published a thorough analysis of the problem, entitled “Aircraft Design-Induced Pilot Error.” (1)* Wiener (2) extended the concept to include “system-induced error” in his analysis of controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents. If human errors can be induced by design, they can also be prevented at the design stage, but in order to do so, the behavioral consequences of possible design decisions must be taken into account. Most of the focus has been on hardware: this paper extends the concept to other features of the human-machine interface that are vulnerable to design-induced errors. The position is taken that human factors and human error prevention should be part of the process of transport certification, which presently is confined to the measurement of workload.
