The development of ships tends to be “incremental” rather than revolutionary, with designs gradually being improved over the years, and each new “generation” being an advance of that which has gone before. But how do these improvements get made and what mechanism is there for actually learning what works well and what doesn’t, once the ship is in service? It is not a straightforward question, as ships are designed by naval architects and constructed by shipbuilders, neither of whom will have much in the way of seagoing and operational experience. So the important thing is to have some sort of system that feeds back to the builders and designers both what they have done right, and what could be improved.
Ideally, a designer and shipbuilder will keep the user “in the loop” and stay attuned to operational demands by talking to them at a regular basis. There have been some notably successful schemes for fulfilling this aim. One clever idea was to incorporate practising seafarers into a design team so that the detailed design of the ship would be far more “user-friendly”. Thus a team from the deck department would ensure that the mooring equipment and the bridge design were optimised, while engineers made sure that the layout of the machinery spaces was to their liking. Even cooks were employed to “feed” their ideas into the design for the galley.
It was the experience of these people which was their qualification for their participation in the design exercise and all agreed that a far better ship was built as a result. They would rarely make major changes, but because they were concerned with operation, rather than the ease of construction, their contribution to the detailed design was so valuable. They could see that a winch would work more efficiently if it was situated in a certain position, while they would be able to see the problems of trying to maintain machinery that was situated without any particular though. They would know that if you situate some obstruction on the deck, somebody will trip over it, or detect insufficient headroom, before somebody brains himself!
It is argued (invariably by seafarers) that the lessons of such schemes need to be practised more widely, with too many ships entering service without such attention to “user-detail”. Some shipbuilders are very good at this. One builder of supply boats and offshore craft has become famous for its attention to detail, and the way it carefully investigates the opinions of the first crew of a new design, to see what improvements can be made to subsequent ships in the series. With everyone paying rather more attention to the “human element” these days, such attention to the opinions of not just the ship management, but the actual crew, is important, and will lead to better ships.
Source: BIMCO