Up to 96% of maritime accidents (collision, grounding, fire, occupational accidents) are routinely attributed to human error. However, rather than assessing the ship performance in terms of global design factors such as ship motions and noise, the human element studies have primarily focused on local design features (e.g., bridge design) that are relatively easy to fix and tune towards required effects on the crew. From the formal point of view, the key element that has been missing and therefore preventing the integration of the human element into ship design projects is a comprehensive quantification of crew performance failure. Given the natural uncertainty of the maritime environment, such quantification must be probabilistic and therefore commensurate with safety-driven ship design methods such as the Risk-Based Design.In project FAROS, the rationalised nature of the Risk-Based Design will be used to integrate the human element into the ship safety framework and deliver ship concepts (ro-pax and tanker) that are safe, economic and “green”. This will be achieved by (1) quantitatively linking global design factors to the crew performance failure modes (fatigue, gross and fine motor skills etc.) and (2) optimising multi-disciplinary ship performance using state-of-the-art tools, methods and empirical knowledge.It is expected that the societal and personal risks on tanker and ro-pax ships can be reduced at least by 30%, provided recommended amendments to design rules are implemented and the developed ship design assessment framework, which takes into account the crew performance at sea, is used in daily ship design practice by parties relevant.