Keywords

1.1 Introduction

Safety research and practice has struggled with how to describe, define and represent safety in order to understand the concept better or to communicate its importance. Visual representations have been produced since the beginning of safety practice and research, but research on visualisation has been dispersed, and rather scarce so far. Some notable exceptions are the works in cognitive engineering stemming from the need to design computer interfaces [1], in human factors when developing a better understanding and design of safety warning signs [2], in social, political and historical perspectives of safety posters [3, 4], in ethnographic studies based on sociomaterial sensitivities [e.g., 5, 6], in graphic design when commenting engineering decisions that led to disasters [e.g., 7, 8], in reflections on the graphic dimension of safety models [9,10,11], and in analysis of the safety narratives of movies [12,13,14]. We introduce these studies very briefly below.

The role of visualising in our understanding of safety has been little conceptualised previously. Emphasis on technical components, on actions of various individuals through cognition, organisation or regulation thanks to established disciplines such as engineering, cognitive psychology, sociology of organisations or management and political sciences have framed our grasp of safety in the past 30 years. Little has been granted to a transversal appreciation of visual artefacts (e.g., pictures, images, videos, drawings, movies, posters) across descriptions and conceptualisations from this diversity of disciplines. Yet, in the daily practices of the high-risk industries, a world of images exists made of warning signs, diagrams (including PID: process instruments diagrams), alarms, thresholds, schematic, tables, pictograms, posters, procedures, schedules, Gantt charts, indicators, maps, logs, forms, causal diagrams but also, photographs, videos or movies supporting, guiding and providing contexts for the social fabric of safety.

1.2 Ways of Visualising

Posters and warning signs are probably the first visualisations which come to mind when thinking about safety, whether as an employee in a factory or in a high-risk system, as a user of services such as transportation, as a consumer of a diversity of products, or simply as a third party exposed to externalities of organisations. Design of warning signs and behavioural response to them by the diversity of audiences have been studied for many years now [2]. Interest in safety information displayed in other communicative art forms such as posters in factories have also been granted, exploring the views of workers and safety that they embody and their evolution in time as well as difference across countries [3].

Interfaces are also quite clearly in the mind of many when it comes to visualising because of how much they frame activities of process operators in control rooms, of pilots in cockpit, of surgeons in operating theatres, etc. This has been an important research area in the field of cognitive engineering from the 1980s, with now many established writers and standards publications on the topic [1].

Engineers also rely on drawings and visualisations to help decision-making, e.g., when identifying hazards, assessing risks or designing processes. Analysis by Tufte of the graphics which supported the decision rationale of the Challenger launch in 1986 has become a landmark study of this aspect of engineering decision-making [7]. By omitting to exhibit in an appropriate manner data which were available and that they knew to be important to ground their rationale, engineers failed to provide a more complete view of the relationship between temperatures and O-rings’ problems. “The chart makers had reached the right conclusion. They had the correct theory and they were thinking causally, but they were not displaying causally” [7, p. 44].

Operators and engineers are of course not the only users of graphics. Managers also rely on them. The most evident example in the field of safety are the trends based on indicators which are built and followed to steer organisations’ degree of achievement in preventing health, occupational or process events. The widespread use of ratios in occupational safety calculating the number of days off for injured people per hours worked and also number and magnitude of various incidents are transformed into graphics. The validity of these indicators as safety measures has been questioned by safety science, but their use in industry is still widespread. This is probably at least in part due to their easy visualisation and the apparent easiness of interpreting the visual.

Safety researchers are also great producers and users of drawings, pictures and visualisations for conceptualising the phenomena they attempt to grasp. Examples abound of drawings supporting the framing of scientific areas of investigation: human error, sociotechnical systems, comparing high-risk systems or accident causation have all been assisted by pictures, drawings or images other than texts [9]. They are designed by various authors and circulate among peers, sometimes bridging research and practice, and shaping the field through their heuristic visual properties. This drawing creativity is quite widespread among safety professionals too who are not only consumers but also designers and producers of their own drawings, pictures and visualisations that they regularly use in practice.

Some visualisations in safety science have also remained in use despite a lot of scientific evidence against the theoretical models underlying the visualisation. Examples of these are the domino model of accident causation, accident-incident triangle and the Swiss Cheese accident model. Again, their visual properties make them attractive to a general audience. Sometimes, the attractiveness of the visualisation may be a more important factor explaining the diffusion of the model than its underlying logic concerning the phenomena depicted.

This very short description of the world of pictures, drawings and visualisation does not exhaust the diversity of other image-based artefacts, such as photographs, Powerpoint, cartoons, videos, TV programmes or movies which also offer some support for descriptions, interpretations, narratives and understandings of safety for a wider audience than the people populating workplace, factories, high-risk systems or the users of services (e.g., transport).

For instance, recent movies which come to mind are blockbusters such as Sully or DeepWater Horizon, and popular programmes about aircraft crashes or other disasters are quite regularly broadcasted on TV, such as, in French, “la minute de vérité” (the minute of truth), which are extremely useful in human factors or sociology of safety training courses. Moreover, in the context of our increasingly digital world, safety movies available on YouTube or Daily Motion, whether from practitioners or academics (e.g., conference, courses), are also now a widespread phenomenon, which provide support for the visual diffusion of safety research, practices and ideas.

1.3 Chapters of This Book

This book is derived from a workshop held in June 2019 in Royaumont, France, to address the issues discussed above. The above introduction, accompanied by some illustrations that we were unable to reproduce here for copyright reasons, was sent to a selected group of renowned scientists in the field of safety and visualisation. Accompanying the general introduction was description of the aim and preliminary topics for the workshop. These are reproduced below.

The aim of the workshop was to explore this realm of visualisations, images, drawings, pictures, photographs and videos in the field of safety. It wished to build a better appreciation of how these diverse artefacts contribute in their own specific way to the social fabric of reliability, safety or resilience. It was an exploratory workshop, aware of the limited number of studies available, but willing to open many different lines of investigation; a workshop therefore multidisciplinary in its prospect. It wished to increase our awareness of the incredible complexity of the current sociomaterial dynamics of our mediatised, digitalised and globalised world. “Like it or not, the emerging global society is visual” [15, p. 4].

The following non-exhaustive list of questions to explore was included in the original call:

  • Which are the examples of successful visualisations in safety, in research, in practice? Do we know why?

  • How do safety pictures, signs, drawings, visualisations or videos in safety have evolved over time? Can we characterise this evolution?

  • How to classify the diversity of visual artefacts in safety? In relation to what properties? From simplicity to complexity? From dynamic to static? To what features?

  • What is your experience as a researcher of drawings, pictures or videos? How important are they to your research process, from theorising to communicating? Are visualisations only appropriate to communicate about safety, or also to conceptualise safety?

  • How do pictures, drawings or videos contribute to the enactment of safety? What do we know about the effects/influence of visualisation on safety (structures, processes, outcome)? What kind of agency do pictures, drawings or visualisations have in safety? How performative are they? How can we describe conceptualise or even measure this performativity?

  • How do practitioners and/or researchers produce, use and disseminate diverse visualisations in their daily activity? How important is it to their coordination, cooperation or communication?

  • How does visualising a concept change the concept? Do visualisations complement, accompany or replace texts? Are safety models and theories best conveyed by drawings than texts?

  • How do research drawings, pictures or videos contribute to our framing of safety as a scientific object?

  • How do videos or movies portray safety through their narratives? Can they be useful support for safety management, for public awareness or dread? How?

  • What kind of opportunities new technology offers in the context of safety knowledge production, transmission and use?

  • How does big data shape new need for visualisations in the field of safety? Can the tools and methodologies develop in the context of big data transferred in a safety context?

  • What are the limits of visualising? Are there some phenomena that cannot or should not be visualised? Are there dangers in visualising complex phenomena such as safety? How do you visualise risk and uncertainty?

  • How do visualisations guide the attention of public and experts on risks and safety? Can a vivid visualisation create biases (e.g., availability bias) that distract attention from other, less visualised, risks or types of safety?

1.4 Organising the Workshops and the Book

The workshop was organised by an international, interdisciplinary study group New Technologies and Work (NeTWork). It was the 34th workshop by NeTWork, which has been active since the 1980s (network-network.org).

The concept of these workshops has been to maximise an international interdisciplinary discussion on topics of technology, work and management. Therefore, only a small group of researchers and practitioners is invited to each workshop. The group is led by an international core group of scientists who evaluate the former workshops and plan the forthcoming. The core group is responsible for the topic as well as for the invitation to a limited group of experts invited, ad personam, in the field of the workshop’s interest.

The call was distributed by the core group of the NeTWork with the aim of inviting experts familiar with the topic of the call. As is the tradition in the NeTWork workshops, each participant was asked to write a “position paper” summarising the key points of their contribution and submit it to the organisers a few weeks before the workshop. Position papers were shared among the participants prior to the workshop, and each participant was expected to read them. This contributed to active participation and discussion during the three-day workshop.

Chapters of this book are based on the position papers presented and discussed at length during the workshop and revised based on the feedback received. The “Brief” nature of the collection means that contributions are limited in length. The book’s open access licence made it difficult to obtain reprinting rights to several legacy documents including many visualisations included in the original position papers. A positive side of open access is that authors can reuse and develop their ideas further, and also reach a wider audience. Chapters in this book thus contain the essence of the arguments but omit much of the background explanation and accompanying “legacy” visualisations. This is an interesting observation as such concerning the use and reuse of visual artefacts in safety science research.

In Chap. 2, Paul Swuste et al. take a look at the history of drawings, posters and photos in safety and safety science. Their position paper included numerous images that captured the development of visual side of safety through the years. The chapter in this book includes their core arguments but omits much of the visualisations. Their chapter illustrates how the early visualisations show a clear message of fear and guilt, whereas organisational factors also appear in more recent visualisations.

Chapter 3 by Aurelien Portelli et al. addresses a particular case of educating nuclear workers through images by looking at the work of Jacques Castan. He was an illustrator at the French Commissariat à l’énergie atomique (CEA) and was in charge of illustrating radiation protection campaigns in the Marcoule nuclear site during the 1960s. Portelli et al. focus on a series of posters designed by Castan on the topic of dosimeter films and pens. They identify three main iconographic elements within the series: anxiety, anthropomorphism and sublimation.

In Chap. 4, Patrick Waterson tackles the ways of seeing and not seeing safety by looking at safety models and their associated visualisations. Drawing on the pathbreaking contribution of John Berger, he contemplates why visual representations are so common in safety models and what does the use of visual representations tell us about research and practice in safety science.

In Chap. 5, Torgeir Haavik discusses visualisation and representations. He looks at representation as immutable mobiles, borrowing the concept from Bruno Latour to show what makes them so powerful tools in safety. Haavik uses the sharp end/blunt end metaphor as a case for illustrating the challenges of immutable mobiles, for example when travelling across contexts and scales.

Chapter 6 by Erik Hollnagel, based on his extensive production of safety-related visualisations, asks the fundamental question of whether safety as such can be visualised. He makes a distinction between visualisation for safety and visualisation of safety. The latter Hollnagel deems impossible, whereas the former can be achieved, depending on the purpose of the visualisation. He suggests that visualising should not be a purpose in itself, but a means to achieve a purpose.

In Chap. 7, Doug Smith and colleagues move the reader into the animated, digitalised and software-oriented side of visualisation, and demonstrate how functional signatures can be used to visualise complex industrial operations with the help of computers. Functional signatures are an extension of the functional resonance analysis method (FRAM) that can help monitor complex operations and improve tractability. They provide an example of the functional signature concept based on ship navigation in a simulated ship environment.

Chapter 8 by John Flach offers a control theoretic perspective on safety and visualisation. He presents the design principles of semantic mapping and systematicity and argues that these are fundamental to all forms of representations. Flach demonstrates how the way we are able to visualise the state of the system is central to our ability to anticipate, and control, risk.

In Chap. 9, Charles Stoessel and Raluca Ciobanu present a safety design approach to occupation safety in revamping operations. Their chapter takes a look at how design engineers perceive specific design safety issues pertaining to the revamping of existing facilities. The authors discuss the formation of situated safety skills and use of visualisation tools to improve safety through design.

Chapter 10 by Kaupo Viitanen and Teemu Reiman describe how a network visualisation method was developed and used in supply chain quality and safety assurance of a nuclear power plant construction project which relies on a myriad of contractors and subcontractors. The method was developed as a solution to better make sense of how a project network of multiple organisations creates preconditions for safety.

In Chap. 11, Gisquet and Rot show with an ethnographic case study how visualisation helps to maintain safety requirements in construction of underground infrastructures, an extension of the Paris metro in particular. They show how visual artefacts such as maps, notes, visual plans and schedules and other visual aids advance safety by helping participants inhabit, discuss and synchronise their workspaces.

Chapter 12 by Shane Dixon and Tim Gawley examines the film Only the Brave (2017), which recounts the real story of the deaths of 19 wildland firefighters in the 2013 Yarnell Hill Fire in Arizona, USA. They illustrate how film can visually communicate the story of an accident and how narrative choices affect which factors of the incident are highlighted and which are excluded.

In Chap. 13, we conclude and provide some future research directions.