Engineering Explained: Warning labels and human factors

In 2024, 15 million people visited the emergency room due to products. If the manufacturer or the designer put a label that has a warning on their product, there is a reason, and you need to know what that is. I'm Deborah Dickerson, and I'm an associate professor here in the Industrial and Systems Engineering Department, and I'm in the Human Factors Engineering group. Human Factors engineers take any engineering design and ensure that it is compatible with human capabilities. So those human capabilities might be cognitive or perceptual or even biomechanical or physical. So we want to make sure that things that engineers are designing are not going to be incompatible with humans and cause stress or harm or injury. My research is in product safety, warnings and labels and communications on products to make sure that they are compatible with human cognitive processes. So we want to make sure that humans can understand what the label is trying to convey. Pictograms are images, they're drawings that go onto a product label to convey a meaning. And sometimes they do a good job conveying the meaning and sometimes they don't. I recently did a study looking at these chemical label pictograms. I was trying to see if users would be able to understand what they were intended to convey. Here's one that was fairly easily understood, flammable. So it means that the chemical is capable of bursting into flames in normal temperature conditions here's one that almost completely failed this one looks a bit like the flammable label and it's meant to convey the concept of oxidizer it's a chemical that will make a flame worse much worse a chemist or hazardous materials person would know that but the general population did not in my study i wanted to show one that is a fairly universal symbol, this one. It really means pay attention. On many products, it appears in computer apps to get your attention, just to tell you something's not right and you should find out more. People can be surprised by the products that are hazardous. The Consumer Product Safety Commission is the agency that is tasked with overseeing product safety in the United States. And in 2024, they reported an increase of 18% in product related injuries. 15 million people visited the emergency room due to products. And the categories that they listed as being the most problematic in that things that were catching fire, so batteries, power stations, power outlets, things like that. Second was furniture, easy to tip over TVs. They are falling on people and causing injuries. And then chemical poisonings. And the leading chemical in that category is laundry and dish detergent. They look maybe like a gummy candy and so there's a problem with children ingesting those. If the manufacturer or the designer put a label that has a warning on their product, there is a reason and you need to know what that is.