The theme for this international summer school is Design for Safety. It reflects the growing and universal influence of information technology on the development of systems in industry and the use of these systems in various organizations that produce safety-critical systems. Among relevant industrial sectors are aerospace, medicine, nuclear energy, transport, chemical and food industries. The summer school will develop a system level view of design for safety. Safety is often related to human error and reliability.
Human reliability is always, and can only be, constructed in organizational context.
That is, human reliability is not simply a property of an individual operator, but a relation between an operator and task demands set by organizational context. Furthermore, the organizational context is dynamic since operators' competence evolves and new practices develop. Experience feedback permits organizations to learn from operational incidents. Key issue here include how to understand experience in terms that can be used to change practices, and how to design channels for the communication of representations of operational experience. Taking safety seriously requires designing whole systems rather than individual devices or interfaces.