Process Safety with Trish & Traci Human Factors Engineering: Designing Systems Around Our Limitations
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Feb 24, 2026 David Strobar, founder of Bevel Engineering and the Center for Operator Performance, brings human factors engineering expertise. He highlights historic accidents tied to human limitations. Short segments explore perception illusions, cognitive limits like chunking, anthropometry, design-induced errors such as stove controls, and practical design choices to reduce mistakes.
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Common Human Roots Of Major Industrial Disasters
- Human factors explain why Chernobyl, Bhopal, Three Mile Island, Deepwater Horizon, and Texas City share root causes in human performance.
- David Strobar emphasizes that human limitations in perception, decision-making, and memory make these incidents comparable rather than isolated engineering failures.
Human Factors Engineering Matches Design To Human Limits
- Human factors engineering integrates human characteristics into human-machine system design to match how people actually perceive and decide.
- Strobar notes we process information with common limits: bottlenecked conscious processing, memory chunking, and predictable biases in probability estimation.
We Misjudge Time And Risk In Predictable Ways
- Humans share predictable perceptual and cognitive traits like inaccurate time estimates and misjudged probabilities.
- Strobar argues these universal limitations are why individuals cannot reliably self-assess performance, driving the need for engineered safeguards.