The ”human factor”
or
Why social perspectives on
technology development are
important
Marie Aurell
Department of Industrial economics
Blekinge Institute of Technology
Remember this?
The Challenger disaster
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Took place on the 28th of January 1986.
Seven astronauts lost their lives on live TV.
Years and years of work, billions of dollars, down the
drain.
Deep crisis for NASA and the space programme.
How could it happen? What went wrong?
And specifically: What’s to learn from this in relation to
other types of technology development projects?
What do you do after a disaster?
• You investigate (the Rogers commission).
• You look for an explanation (and a scapegoat?)
• You want to learn, in order to avoid making the
same mistake again.
So, what was found to have caused the Challenger
disaster?
Answer #1: The O-ring
Answer #2: Incompetent managers
Different layers of causes
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The O-ring had not been tested at low temperatures (as
at the day of the launch).
NASA’s managers were considered to have forced
through the launch, although they knew about the risks.
 scapegoats appointed.
But, and this is where the social perspectives come in,
how could this happen? Is there more to the course of
events that can help us understand?
Diane Vaughan: The Challenger Launch Decision:
Risky Technology, Culture, and Deviance at NASA,
1996
Introduces the concept of normalization of
deviance to explain how the decision to launch
could be made.
Approach
Focus on the course of events leading up to the
decision to launch, seen through they eyes of the
engineers and managers involved.
Vaughan’s findings
No safety regulations were violated. No single individual was at
fault. NASA-managers were not ”evil”.
Instead: Engineers and managers jointly and slowly created a
culture where the tolerance of risk rose, and deviations were
normalized.
Contributing factor: The engineers’ and managers’ lack of
understanding of eachother.
The result: Collective poor judgement, and a fatal decision.
Engineer/management relations
So, how can we balance specialization with a general
integrated understanding of other professional
competencies?
Integration does not happen just by putting different
competencies in the same room, but requires more.
What does an engineer need?
From the point of view of my role in educating
future engineers (civilingenjör industriell ekonomi):
• Technical competence is central, obviously.
• But – the challenges the engineer faces in
his/her profession, for instance in projects, are
usually not in themselves technical. 
Economic and social perspectives.
• Must be trained in education and in professional
life.
An example from the
educational perspective
From year 1 we try to place courses of different types in
parallell, and integrate them:
• Course: Technical specialization
• Course: Project management, leadership,
communication
• Examination: Reports requiring integration of
perspectives and presentations to an audience of
different professions.
• What the students think of this? Painful! Difficult (never
just one solution)!
Thank you!