Prototype to Product

Chapter 10. Staying Safe: Regulations, Standards, Etc.

We want our products to be safe, of course. We don’t want others to be injured by what  we make, and we don’t want to face lawsuits or worse.

However, nothing we make is perfectly safe, no matter how hard we work at it. Given virtually any object, users can figure out some clever way to cause harm. Some products, like cars and firearms, are obviously capable of great unintentional mayhem. If not designed properly, anything we plug into a wall outlet can cause electric shock, possibly fatal, under certain conditions. And even a bottle cap can cause a child to choke.

So how do we balance safe with reasonable? We can always expend more effort making products incrementally safer, but at what point do we say “good enough”? Because this is literally a life-and-death question, governments and various other organizations have spent a lot of time thinking about the answers. The answers show up in the form of regulations, standards, and other rules that we’ll review in this chapter. By defining “safe” at the government level, a level playing field is set where all manufacturers abide by the same rules.

Regulations have (generally) made the products that we use safer. Auto regulations are a great example of this. When I was my son’s age, there were approximately 3.3 deaths per million vehicle miles travelled in the US. Today that’s down to about 1.1 deaths, a two-thirds drop. Better seat belts, air bags, safety glass, the addition of ...