Safety in Design

This review explores how a culture of design for safety can enhance the safety of the world around us. Design for safety goes beyond legislation, regulations and standards. These all play an important role for established products and services but their limited scope often leads to missed opportunities to enhance safety by taking a broader perspective. Design is applied to both mature industries (which have many years of experience and a good understanding of risks and how to reduce them) and emerging industries (that use new technologies requiring new ways of controlling risk which may not yet be known or understood). An example of an emerging risk is the internet that is enabling rapid innovation of new products which generate data. This data is widely shared across the internet and the risks associated with this are as yet not fully understood by the public. A design for safety culture takes a holistic approach to understanding the influences that affect safety. Such influences are varied and take into account the broader environment within which design operates, including complex interactions, behaviour and culture. It goes beyond traditional design methods and focuses on the goal of a safer design. Implementing design for safety requires an understanding of the challenges and the methods to address them. It needs multidisciplinary teams that bring together people with the relevant skills to understand the challenges and a collaborative approach of ‘designing with’ rather than the more traditional approach of ‘designing for’. This can be achieved through an international diverse community that works together to identify and share best practices.

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The " Safety Grand Challenge " is a collaborative research project between the Royal College of Art (RCA) School of Design, and the Lloyd's Register Foundation (LRF). The maritime industry is dominated by " grandfathering " leading to a slow-pace of adopting innovations that can reduce risk and save lives at sea. We describe how impact was achieved through collaboration and design innovations that bridged the risk gap between technologies and human behaviours. Starting from the project brief we designed a collaborative platform that supported a constructive dialogue between academia and partner organisations that aimed to foster innovative design approaches to risk and safety. The project generated an engaged community with diverse expertise that influenced the outcomes which included seven prototypes designed by a group of thirty students from across the RCA. Throughout the course of the project the network extended to other partners beyond the initial ones that included the RCA, LRF and Royal National Lifeboat Institution. The " Safety Grand Challenge " demonstrates how research can be an explorative platform that offers opportunities to analyse and design solutions to real life safety problems in mature industries through the prototypes that reflect the sophistication of the project's collaborations. Our conclusions support how design research helped identify the value of design for safety in tackling complex issues that intertwine human, environmental and commercial views and can shape new forms of collaborative research between academia and industrial partners.

"Risk Management has failed to achieve an acceptable level of workplace safety and it is time to rethink the strategy. It has failed because the management of risk implies that there is a degree of acceptable risk, consequently for management the task is fundamentally to determine what that degree is and to ensure that activities can be undertaken within acceptable parameters. In this regard risk management is, at best, an inexact science based on the premise that it is neither practicable nor feasible to have knowledge of the particulars of a process to control the outcomes sufficiently. Alternatively it is viewed as the product of a misconception about the inevitability of unplanned and uncontrolled incidents.

This paper challenges the concept of risk management itself and argues that although techniques may improve, risk management inevitably relies on subjective judgments that cost the United States billions of dollars annually, as a direct result of safety, health & environmental failures. This paper argues for a paradigm that shifts the onus from managing risk to managing the operation. It presents a model of operational management where control of the operation flows from the essential foundations of knowledge and understanding of each of the integral elements of the overall operation.

The paper also examines the relationship between the core participants in the production process, worker, contractor, client and legislature, and argues that effective operational management necessarily requires each to adopt a perspective that acknowledges and acts upon the duties and obligations each owes to the others. These obligations extend to their need to be fully cognizant of the operation and competent in the exercise of their particular role."

"Competence - the Conception Principle

Is there anything so elusive or thought provoking as defining competence? Let’s start with this thought; “every worker is competent”. In fact let us go one stage further and say that everyone is competent. We can explore definitions later, but it important to acknowledge this fact.

Now why would you imagine that to be so when the debate up to now has been about taught competence? However what of reasoning, integrity, honesty, creative thinking, visualising. Are these natural attributes not also an essential element of competence?

From the point of its conception a child has the ability and the instinct to survive. For that to happen effectively he needs to find nourishment, warmth, comfort and protection, which he gets from his mother. In those early days through to some period of months after its birth the child is totally dependent on his mother to provide for all of his needs, but eventually there comes a time when the child starts to talk, walk and develop the skills needed to survive as an independent person. As the child grows the degree of dependence he has on his parents, his teachers and his mentors diminishes. And so the journey is one from total dependence through to complete independence of thought and of deed.

In order to accept this it is necessary to acknowledge some basic truths about competence. The authors are happy to explore the skills, knowledge and ability aspect of the competence definition but first let’s get to the core.

Is it possible that the natural instinct to survive is a core tenet of competence?

And if this is so then at a point where individuals do not possess all of the skills and resources needed to survive there is a level of dependence on others to provide assistance; the child and his mother; the new student and his teacher; new employee and her colleagues. But as the individuals’ skills, knowledge and ability grow their level of competence grows to a point where they can perform fully in their chosen occupation with confidence. And it is just as essential that as this journey progresses that the dependency on others will and must be allowed to diminish. Creating a false degree of dependency affects an individual’s ability to achieve their full competence potential.

Just for one second consider how well an animal reared in captivity would survive in the wild..."