Use Error: Design Need or User's Fault?

This photo captures exactly why "design" is so important. Taken during the recent tragedy of Southwest 1180, does this photo expose the need for design thinking in our modern airline safety protocols, products, and support?

Although the yellow oxygen cup meets the engineering requirement of physically being able to cover your nose and mouth - and even though we've heard the instructional speech a thousand times - under duress the human mind changes. Look at the picture. Would you have put the mask on correctly?

The stressed and panicked human doesn't think like an engineer, with an advanced degree, sitting in an engineering and design review, designing by committee, with a bunch of other highly qualified risk-averse human factors specialists and product line managers, adhering to senior consensus, budgets, and company politics.

Panic makes the blood flow differently, we think in a different manner. We experience tunnel vision. We make decisions emotionally. When confronted with a new situation we think via metaphors. But does the corporate product development culture test products for behavior and emotional interpretation? Or is it too costly? The truth is we test for easy to measure metrics like "fit" rather than employing messy evidence-based behavioral design methodologies.

The practices of design and design ethnography are concerned with the intersection of behaviors and interactions. How people "should do things" is simply not as important as how they "will do things". It is the collaboration of design with engineering and human factors that often lead to the most robust solutions. And perhaps there is a certain irony that the creative discipline of "design" is often the most in-tune to the reality of human imperfection.

... and off the cuff, I'd start with exploring a yellow cup that "looked" like a section of a diving mask so people would remember to put their damn noses into to it and then expand our design exploration from there. I'd also use a service design program to re-evaluate the way we deploy safety information to passengers. We would bring in some great HF people and ethnographers to work side by side with the designers and engineers to stress test usage throughout the generative and evaluative research. And yes - it might cost a few pennies more in production, deployment, and NRE (and D).

Worth it.

.........

Edit Added:

What the airlines are intending for people to do in an emergency and what actually happened are different. Here are recordings of the safety talk from Southwest, Delta, United, and American. In every video, it states and shows usage over the nose and mouth. Judge for yourself if the actual usage matches the intended and communicated usage.

https://youtu.be/UfPycA1_MxM

https://youtu.be/_Wy7J5Tq2D0

https://youtu.be/cuR-l2qCxBc

https://youtu.be/LXb28mVZiJo