Designing for innovation and safety: How can medical device designers do both?

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This research is concerned with how medical device designers can negotiate the twin requirements of developing both safe and innovative products. The focus is on the management of designers, and particularly how designers use the characteristics of their jobs (for example, their level of autonomy to make design decisions) in their day-to-day work. The research proposes to assess a number of variables which could influence the designers' perfomance, including facets of their working environment, for example their job characeristics and team context, aspects of their personality, and more dynamic personal influences such as levels of innovation, levels of safety-related cognitive error and important dynamic phenomena related to their job characteristicsAfter assessment of stable aspects of job characteristics and team contexts within which the designers work, at least 150 designers in 20 design teams will be tracked over the course of two working weeks, assessing the dynamic phenomena four times per day, every two hours. The results of the research will increase knowledge concerning how jobs can be configured in order to promote both safety and innovation, as well as having a practical impact in the area of the management of designers workload and working patterns.