Safety Designer
zero to concept
Leading research and concept design for the next major module in the Myzel lifecycle — a tool that guides safety teams through the full machine design process.
The next step in the machine safety lifecycle
Risk Assessment established the foundation — Safety Designer is the next layer. Where Risk Assessment helps teams document and evaluate hazards, Safety Designer guides them through the full machine design process, integrating safety requirements from the earliest stages of engineering.
Building directly on the Risk Assessment module, Safety Designer extends Myzel into a comprehensive machine safety platform — closing the loop between design intent and documented safety compliance.
Safety requirements come too late in the design process
Safety teams are typically brought in after key design decisions have already been made — creating rework, delays, and gaps in compliance documentation. There was no unified tool to integrate safety requirements (SRS) into the machine design workflow from the start.
Leading from a blank page
With no existing design to build on, I led the full discovery and concept phase — defining the research approach, conducting interviews, facilitating workshops, and shaping the product direction alongside the PO and engineering team.
- Research strategy and execution
- User interviews and SME sessions
- Workshop facilitation
- SRS concept development
- Platform feasibility review
- Development estimation input
- 5 user interviews
- 2 subject matter experts
- 1 customer service representative
- Pilz Ireland consultants workshop
Understanding before designing
The research phase was extensive — speaking with safety consultants, engineers, and Pilz's own customer-facing teams to understand how safety requirements are currently captured, communicated, and integrated into machine design.
Spoke with safety engineers and consultants across different company sizes and industries — understanding their current tools, pain points, and how they communicate safety requirements to design teams.
Deep dives with two SMEs on the regulatory and technical requirements for Safety Requirement Specifications (SRS) — understanding what must be captured, in what format, and for what downstream use.
Facilitated a co-design workshop with Pilz Ireland safety consultants — the people who use these tools with clients daily. Used the session to validate early concepts and surface requirements we hadn't anticipated.
Shaping the SRS prototype
Research findings fed directly into multiple rounds of concept development. The output was a near-MVP SRS prototype — integrated with Risk Assessment and validated against platform feasibility and development estimates.
Designed the Safety Designer workflow to connect directly to existing risk assessments — pulling hazard data and feeding safety requirements back into the design process.
Developed and tested several concept directions before converging on an approach — each validated against research findings and technical constraints.
Worked alongside engineering to validate the concept against what was technically achievable within the Myzel platform architecture.
Contributed to development sizing discussions — ensuring the concept was scoped realistically and priorities were aligned with available capacity.
What zero-to-one requires
"Starting from nothing requires more patience, more questions, and more willingness to throw away early ideas than any other kind of design work."
Safety Designer is the first module I've led entirely from scratch — no existing designs, no inherited decisions. The research phase took longer than expected, and that was the right call. Every hour spent with users before touching Figma saved days of rework later.