Want some good guidance on Safe Design? In this 52-minute video from the Safety Artisan, you will find it. I take the official guidance from Safe Work Australia. Then I provide some value-adding commentary on it, based on my 10+ years of experience working system safety under Australian WHS Law.
This guidance integrates seamlessly with Australian law and regulations, as it is designed to be consistent. However, it is genuinely useful in any jurisdiction.
A free video on ‘Good Work Design‘ is available here.
Topics: Safe Design
- A safe design approach;
- Five principles of safe design;
- Ergonomics and good work design;
- Responsibility for safe design;
- Product lifecycle;
- Benefits of safe design;
- Legal obligations; and
- Our national approach.
Transcript: Safe Design
Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Safety Artisan, where you will receive safety training via instructional videos on system safety, software safety, and design safety. Today I’m talking about design safety. What we’re going to be talking about is safe design, and this safe design guidance comes from Safe Work Australia. I’m showing you some text taken from the website and adding my own commentary and experience.
Topics
The topics that we’re going to cover today are – a safe design approach, five principles of safe design, ergonomics (more broadly, its human factors). Who has responsibility, doing safe design through the product lifecycle, the benefits of it, our legal obligations in Australia (but this is good advice wherever you are). Lastly, the Australian approach to improving safe design in order to reduce casualties in the workplace.
Introduction
The idea of safe design is it’s about integrating safety management, asset identification, and risk assessment early in the design process. We do this to eliminate or reduce risks throughout the life of a product, whatever the product is, it might be a building, a structure, equipment, a vehicle or infrastructure. This is important because in Australia, in a five-year period, we suffered almost 640 work-related fatalities, of which almost 190 were caused by unsafe design or design-related factors contributed to that fatality. So, there’s an important reason to do this stuff, it’s not an academic exercise, we’re doing it for real reasons. And we’ll come back to the reason why we’re doing it at the end of the presentation.
A Safe Design Approach #1
First, we need to begin safe design right at the start of the lifecycle (we will see more of that later). It’s at the beginning of the lifecycle when you’re making your bad decisions about requirements. What do you want this system to do? How do we design it to do that? What materials and components and subsystems are we going to make or buy to put this thing together, whatever it is? Thinking about how we are going to construct it, maintain it, operate it, and then get rid of it at the end of life. There are lots of big decisions being made early in the life cycle. And sometimes these decisions are made accidentally because we don’t consciously think about what we’re doing. We just do stuff and then we realise afterwards that we’ve made a decision with sometimes quite serious implications.
A big part of my day job as a consultant was trying to help people think about those issues and make good decisions early on when it’s still cheap, quick and easy to do. Because the more you’ve invested into a project, the more difficult it is to make changes. This is both from a financial point of view and if people have invested their time, sweat and tears into a project, they get very attached to it and they don’t want to change it. There’s an emotional investment made in the project.
The earlier you get in, at the feasibility stage let’s say, and think about all of this stuff the easier it is to do it. A big part of that is where is this kit going to end up? What legislation codes of practice and standards do we need to consider and comply with? So that’s the approach.
A Safe Design Approach #2
So, designers need to consider how safety can be achieved through the lifecycle. For example, can we design a machine with protective guarding so that the operator doesn’t get hurt using it, but also so the machine can be installed and maintained? That’s an important point as often to get at stuff we must take it apart and maybe we must remove some of those safety features. How do we then protect and maintain when the machine is maybe opened up, and the workings are things that you can get caught in or electrocuted by.
And how do we get rid of it? Maybe we’ve used some funky chemicals that are quite difficult to get rid of. In Australia, I suspect like many other places, we’ve got a mountain of old buildings that are full of asbestos, which is costing a gigantic sum of money to get rid of safely. we need to design a building which is fit for occupancy. Maybe we need to think about occupants that are not able bodied or they’re moving stuff around in the building they don’t want to and need a trolley to carry stuff around. we need access, we need sufficient space to do whatever it is we need to do.
This all sounds simple, obvious, doesn’t it? So, let’s look at these five principles. First of all, a lot of this you’re going to recognise from the legal stuff, because the principles of safe design are very much tied in and integrated with the Australian legal approach, WHS, which is all good, all consistent and all fits together.
Five Principles of Safe Design
Principle 1: Persons with control. If you’re making a decision that affects design and products, facilities or processes, it is your responsibility to think about safety, it’s part of your due diligence (If you recall that phrase and that session).
Principle 2: We need to apply safe design at every stage in the lifecycle, from the very beginning right through to the end. That means thinking about risks and eliminating or managing them as early as we can but thinking forward to the whole lifecycle; sounds easy, but it’s often done very badly.
Principle 3: Systematic risk management. We need to apply these things that we know about and listen to other broadcasts from The Safety Artisan. We go on and on and on about this because this is our bread and butter as safety engineers, as safety professionals – identify hazards, assess the risk and think about how we will control the risks in order to achieve a safe design.
Principle 4: Safe design, knowledge and capability. If you’re controlling the design, if you’re doing technical work or you’re managing it and making decisions, you must know enough about safe design and have the capability to put these principles into practice to the extent that you need to discharge your duties. When I’m thinking of duties, I’m especially thinking of the health and safety duties of officers, managers and people who make decisions. You need to exercise due diligence (see the Work Health and Safety lessons for more about due diligence).
Principle 5: Information transfer. Part of our duties is not just to do stuff well, but to pass on the information that the users, maintainers, disposers, etc will need in order to make effective use of the design safely. That is through all the lifecycle phases of the product.
So those are the five principles of safe design, and I think they’re all obvious, right? So, let’s move on…
[The full videos continues.]
My name’s Simon Di Nucci. I’m a practicing system safety engineer, and I have been, for the last 25 years; I’ve worked in all kinds of domains, aircraft, ships, submarines, sensors, and command and control systems, and some work on rail air traffic management systems, and lots of software safety. So, I’ve done a lot of different things!
