Product Design and the Reasonable Person - Nature versus Nurture?

The reasonable person is one who acts with prudence. To avoid liability, product design must assure that the reasonable person will not be injured. The question addressed herein is how much of the reasonable person is reasonably the result of the design and programming of the human machine itself? Is reasonableness nature or nurture? Avoiding injury is often all about seeing, understanding, and avoiding the danger. Taking just one example, human eyes are designed with rods in the periphery of vision. Rods sense motion and are relatively insensitive to static objects. Additionally, humans have only a finite amount of processing power. That power is expended first on the tasks in which humans are engaged. Even if one is aware of dangerous objects in the periphery of vision, that awareness fades as focus is placed on matters of higher priority. Ultimately, product designers must consider and incorporate the broad spectrum of human performance and limitations into product design to avoid being negligent