''A tour de force. A collection of gripping and often alarming true stories meticulously documented and
skillfully told about design-induced human errors. It should be required reading for all engineers and designers,
and everyone else concerned about the ways our modern technological creations can affect our everyday lives.''
--Alphonse Chapanis
''...an engrossing tour through the world of human susceptibility to subtle variations in environment and in
design.''
--Gerald Carr, Commander, NASA Skylab-4 - -
''Steven Casey has put together an astonishing collection of graphic and depicting stories of human and technological
error... you will not be able to put it down.''
--American Scientis
''...extremely readable and fascinating... recommended to anyone, particularly those interested in human factors
research or design.''
--Marine Technology
''Shows how basic paradigms, assumptions, and minor oversights of the designer combine with those of the user
to produce disastrous consequences.''
--Health Physics
''These skillfully told anecdotes take the reader through an array of settings from an A320 Airbus, to ConEd,
to the wizardry of Wall Street... Casey has written a book that demonstrates to laypersons and technocrats alike
how far we are from adequately controlling hazards and managing risks. How safe is safe enough?''
--Design Management Journal
''...fascinating and instructive for anyone involved in product design.''
--Electronic Design
''Set Phasers on Stun... has all the excitement of a Michael Crichton thriller novel. This is one you won't
want to miss.''
--Database
Aegean Publishing Company Web Site, December, 2000
In the new and expanded second edition of 'Set Phasers on Stun' and Other True Tales of Design, Technology,
and Human Error, noted designer and author Steven Casey presents 20 factual and arresting stories about people
and their attempts to use modern technological creations. `Set Phasers on Stun' demonstrates - - with shocking
and graphic candor - - how technological failures result from the incompatibilities between the way things are
designed and the way people actually perceive, think, and act. New technologies will succeed or fail based on our
ability to minimize these incompatibilities between the characteristics of people and the characteristics of the
things we create and use.
Two new chapters, as well as a new introduction, have been added to this second edition. In Murphy's Law and Newton's
Law, listen in as a team of Swedish rocket technicians prepare to launch a payload into space above the arctic
circle, and learn how the user interface on a simple device resulted in one of the most horrific but least publicized
accidents in the history of rocketry. In The Price of the Amagasaki, accompany British Navy diver James Kull as
he attempts a night-time attack on a Japanese warship off Singapore while using a new and poorly understood oxygen
rebreather. Read the gripping stories of a tragic air show demonstration in France involving a new computer-controlled
cockpit, the disaster of the supertanker Torrey Canyon, the human factors at play in the runaway chemical reaction
that we have come to know as Bhopal, and, last but not least, Set Phasers on Stun, the tragic tale of a medical
patient who meets his fate beneath a poorly designed radiotherapy machine in Texas.
From space above Russia, an island in the South Pacific, the hustle and bustle of Wall Street, remote Newfoundland,
a bar in Topeka, northern Iraq, and the Pacific Northwest, Steven Casey lets the reader understand first hand how
the combination of technology and human limitations can go wrong.
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