Human aspects of space survival

I am a new group member and my emphasis is on the human problems of survival rather than the technological aspects (as important as they are). I have science and IT training, and experience in electronics, but in all my experiences and projects I keep running into this one: the human side of the problem. Whether it involves the design of a piece of equipment, a website experience (such as this one), a structure to live or work in, a whole city, or a whole ecological system, human considerations are as important to the final workability of the design as are the other technologies involved.

The most workable paradigm that I have seen used in the field of human thought and behavior is the engineering paradigm. In this paradigm, you develop and implement technologies that could solve the problem, then find ways to test their effectiveness. You pick the technology that is the most "efficient" per your best understanding of how that can be measured.

Efficiency implies both workability and low waste. These are prime criteria for the selection of any technology.

Most currently-popular human "technologies" lack workability, so this has been a huge barrier to progress in this area. This area is also special because it is impossible to totally separate the observer from the phenomena being observed, as we try to in traditional science.

I won't belabor these points in this opening post. But here are a few challenges that lie at various levels of this problem:

1) On this site you have to use a search tool to find messages of interest, or else scroll through all messages, guessing which topics might be appropriate to your interests. Why can't some sort of hierarchical search aid be implemented to help someone zero in on the relevant messages faster?

2) In society we have a crime problem. What are you going to do with a space colonist if he starts to turn criminal(refuses to contribute, goes crazy, kills someone)? Is there a possibility of attempted attacks from rival space groups, and if so, how would this be handled?

I made a group specifically aimed at these considerations called survive-mankind, but I would actually prefer it if a lot of this discussion occurs within the context of this existing group.