Want some good guidance on Safe Design? In this 52-minute video from the Safety Artisan, you will find it. We take the official guidance from Safe Work Australia and provide a value-added commentary on it. The guidance integrates seamlessly with Australian law and regulations, but 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. I’m Simon and I’m recording this on the 12th of January 2020, so our first recording of the new decade and let’s hope that we can give you some 20/20 vision. 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) and 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 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, 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.