Keywords

9.1 Introduction

This study depicts the integration of occupational safety (prevention of injuries, for the workers, that should be distinguished from industrial safety, dealing with the risk of high-scale accidents). Occupational safety is seen throughout the following processes: constructing (“new build”), decommissioning, but also “revamping”. These revamp operations are less studied by the occupational safety and project management literature, in particular the implementation of new equipment/replacement of older equipment in the operating units. These operations may be complicated because engineers don’t start from a “blank page” such as in new builds. On the contrary, they have to take into account the existing activity and the previous history of the operating unit to “insert the transplant” properly. This is a key reason why visualisation will play a major role in this configuration.

The present study aims at producing concepts and operational tools in order to ensure the Prevention through Design process. Thanks to the commitment of the Engineering Division (security experts, projects managers, directors…), a large amount of data have been collected (interviews, technical observations, meetings participation…) during a 3-year research project (2013–2016) in an electrical company which performs high-scale maintenance operations such as replacement of steam generators. The study focuses on the visualisation of the work environment (a steam generator pipe) in classical engineering functional diagrams, represented by the 3D model, and the real working environment experienced/seen by the worker.

These gigantic projects have to take into account classical project management objectives such as time, cost, and quality. In addition, high-risk organisations have to monitor industrial safety and specific industry, such as nuclear power plants, have to minimise workers’ radioactivity exposure. Nevertheless, all these additive objectives must be managed simultaneously. Innovation can create new technical solutions in order to ensure project effectiveness (time/cost) while deploying construction techniques that prevent the workers from injuries and fatalities. The right equipment can save lives: it has to be purchased early enough. In order to set the right equipment for each work situation, the designers should be able to visualise what will be the actual work condition encountered by the workers.

The research shows how designer’s training must integer the use of visualising artefacts such as work situations photos databases, commented and related to context and work stories by experimented trainers. The outputs will also reveal the importance of using visualisation artefacts such as 3D models that clearly help the people designing and planning the operations to get to a better representation of the complexity and varieties of work situations.

9.2 Design Safety and Risk Visualisation

Prevention through Design implies training the designer in experiencing the field difficulties that can be encountered by operations teams, in order to bring them to take into account this occupational safety dimension while designing the early stages of the project. Training the designer should help him understand the difficulties occurring during the construction phase notably through the visualisation of “real work” complexity. For example, working at height is often invisible from the designer’s perspective, but may be a real hazard and a complex situation for the worker involved in this very situation. The design safety objective requires building cooperation within the organisation, implementing dialogue between engineering and risk prevention expertise. Risk visualisation tools can play a major role in this respect.

9.2.1 Active Participation and Permanent Reconfiguration of a Working Group

The notion of design covers all work preparation activities, technical processing of files by design engineers, works planning, budgetary management of projects. The objectives of design safety are to (i) improve the safety of those involved from the design phase, via the detection of potentially hazardous workplace situations (ii) ensure optimal work site safety by taking into account different facets of the activity (technical, ethical, contractual management). It is essential to take all these facets into account to ensure the success of design safety integration projects. As such, design safety relies on collective activity (engineers, design offices, prevention experts, project managers, managers), more specifically on a pragmatist representation of workplace situations [4, 19,20,21, 27, 28].

9.2.2 Interaction of Workspaces and Tools for Integrated Prevention Purposes

Some of the research emphasises the use of the work environment as a resource to organise the current and future actions of professionals [5, 22, 31]. Not only must design engineers find their bearings in this organisational space (geographical area in production centres), they must also project themselves in the relational space by imagining interactions between stakeholders (project coordinator, work supervisor, workers, etc.) who play an important role in their operational intervention [23]. In this context, space can serve as support or constitute a difficulty for their activity [24, 25].

For the purposes of this chapter, we investigate how design engineers perceive specific design safety issues pertaining to the revamping of existing facilities. While their role and the scope of their actions as part of the Design Safety approach are somehow predefined by the company’s process and quality policy, they are not limited to these requirements. How do these engineers, often recently hired within engineering centres, perceive the scope of design safety? Which tools do they rely on to analyse the risks associated with operations? How do they respond to the increasingly demanding reliability requirements in terms of risk analyses and, more generally, workers’ activity?

9.2.3 From Situated Action to Risk Visualisation

Numerous academic studies highlight the importance of a pragmatist design of workplace situations and situated decision-making [4, 19,20,21, 27, 28]: “an analysis as detailed as possible of future workplace situations from the design stage helps identify any risks, with a view to eliminating them or, failing this, reducing them but in any event controlling them” [26], p. 7. Accordingly, the major challenge of the safety of those involved in the design phase is to provide designers with the means to envisage safety in very concrete terms from an early stage, even though it will only come into play years later, during the construction phase. In keeping with research in design ergonomics [8, 9, 11, 13, 18, 35], the authors often emphasise the amount of autonomy required to perform these activities.

9.2.4 Safety Integration and Digital Simulations

While a number of standards describe how to provide for safety integration and workstation ergonomics, they must be supplemented by digital simulation tools. These tools help visualise the design of workspaces so as to rapidly integrate good safety practices. Within modelled work spaces, the use of digital “dummies”, integrated into work environments represented via CAD software (Computer Aided Design), improves the visualisation of the users’ workplace situations in order to improve risk prevention.

Designers can therefore be instrumental in preventing risks to workers (new structures and, by extension, revamping of existing structures), as long as they are trained and have a thorough understanding of the manufacturers’ requirements [3]. In addition, designers argue that they rarely benefit from appropriate initial training as well as tools allowing them to take personnel safety into account [16]. It is therefore advisable to model the reality, whether physiological or psychological processes, potential accidents, man–machine interactions, by using three-dimensional “dummies” and simulating possible interactions between users and the system [12], p. 63.

Our literature review suggests that the design safety project should integrate skills development for prevention experts and designers, notably via training. Educational methods must be suited to the necessary “visualisation” of situations, the development of safety skills which are often learned through direct and situated professional socialisation, in contact with working instruments.

9.3 Methodology

This research involved an inductive survey methodology, allowing actual cases from the field to guide the discussion and adjust initial working assumptions. Once we finished collecting data, we analysed a large number of internal documents relating to the design safety approach, activity observation reports and interviews, as well as field notes.

The study was conducted within two engineering centres and two production sites. In total, we conducted around twelve semi-structured individual interviews which lasted one hour on average, a collective 4 h interview with Safety-Design engineers, 4 observation sessions of safety and operational meetings, as well as spending several days observing the working activity of project teams on sites. The jobs encountered featured safety project managers (internal and service providers), safety controllers, safety-design engineers, field surveillance staff, on-site revamping project managers, etc.

9.4 Results

The main results highlight the current limitations of the risk analyses produced by designers and encourage us to develop tools to visualise the actual configurations of work sites, with a view to addressing this socio-professional discrepancy.

9.4.1 Risk Analysis: From the Designer to the Worker

The field survey, conducted on revamping sites, provides a nuanced picture of the use of risk analyses carried out in engineering centres. Some interviewees feel that these safety risk analyses establish the major principles but fail to go into enough detail to be directly usable downstream of the process. At the moment, risk analyses received in files are not really used on work sites. This means that formal design safety processes are faced with a major difficulty: the ability to “project” from the design situation to the site implementation situation.

Those deployed on the sites are not surprised by this lack of specificity in design risk analyses. Engineering centres find it difficult to benefit from the local, contextual, situated information required for finer risk analyses. The job of those working on the ground is precisely to adapt a generic design file to the local context. Therefore, an important operational avenue would be to increase the amount of information available in engineering centres.

In concrete terms, designers cannot always avail themselves of technical plans and sufficiently reliable and exhaustive photographic databases to fully project into the local context of the actual work site. A possible improvement would therefore be to increase the knowledge available in engineering centres on the “life of work sites” and the actual working conditions of those involved in factories (e.g., time to access the site, joint activity, rescheduling, etc.).

9.4.2 Good Visualisation Practice on Project “CCR43”

Revamping project “CCR43”Footnote 1 was examined during the revamping “integration” phase, on the production site, i.e., during the implementation phase. Project CCR43 is part of a large-scale “VGR” programme which includes a number of VGR work sites at several production locations as well as several CCR43 work sites, also at different production locations. In the plants concerned, work is carried out in a severely restricted environment. There are many risks and space is extremely limited. This is why it is important to visualise the working area to schedule works as accurately as possible. The operation is carried out in a “pillbox”, a multi-storey room more than twenty metres high, with each storey just a few square metres in area.

Of particular importance for risk prevention and visualisation, we observed that the working teams frequently referred to a three-dimensional model of the work site. The “Elbow” technical object, which must be replaced on the CCR43 work site, can thus be easily visualised by the team. In the progression of the visualisation artefacts, this technical object is successively represented using three different visualisation artefacts, functional diagram, 3D model and on-site photo.

The team also uses photographic representations of the “reality” (or rather a portion thereof) of the CCR43 work site and presents a particularly complex working context for the safety of those involved (work at a height, numerous cables, very cramped spaces, multiple pieces of equipment, etc.).

This type of visualisation tool (including photographs, diagrams, sketches, plans, etc.) can therefore serve as work site preparation tools, drivers of joint discussions between groups of stakeholders, risk analysis support and diagnosis tools, work site situation diagnosis and solution identification tools, etc. Furthermore, these means of visualising real-life work site situations may be used when training designers, in conjunction with situational simulations and experiences reported by experienced designers and prevention experts. Visualisation tools could be combined with storytelling techniques enabling designers to identify with workers so that they can project themselves into their “actual work”.

9.4.3 3D Models and Augmented Reality: Visualising for Action and Training Purposes

3D diagrams and 3D print models were identified as good practices which may be developed more systematically. The 3D model should not however be construed as covering all risks, as it must also be updated, and other observation scales may be required. For the RC46 work site for example, the modelling of the pillbox must feature cable runs. These temporary power cables may not have been taken into account during the environment “scanning” phase, even though they pose a potential threat.

As with many tools, the models proposed herewith should not be regarded by the organisation as a substitute for human labour or cooperation and consultation between stakeholders. On the contrary, simulation must enable the development of “discussion forums” on potentially hazardous situations and technical or organisational measures which can be put in place. For training purposes, these tools must be used to show the situation to the engineers assigned to design projects.

9.5 Discussion

Our data gives us a clear understanding of the visualisation issues involved in the organisational construction of occupational safety and security, in the specific case of very large-scale maintenance operations. These revamping sites mobilise national engineering teams, several production sites, numerous partner companies, project teams, etc. over many years. The central theme is to ensure the sustainable reliability of risk analyses, which must be transmitted between several groups of stakeholders forming separate “communities of practice” [4, 6, 20, 34]. One of the major difficulties is to raise the designers’ awareness of the importance of taking worker safety into account from the project design phase, while they are still in the process of drawing functional and technical diagrams. At this stage in the project, details of concrete site working conditions are often unclear. Historically, designers tend to consider that the workers’ safety will be managed “on the work site” and is therefore not their responsibility. This is a twofold challenge: raise their awareness of the importance of this issue and of their potential role in this respect, but also provide them with the tools they need to visualise the reality of workplace situations.

Care must therefore be taken not to emphasise the role of visuals, because the complexity of actual work may always greater than the image reflected by a model or video for example. Furthermore, the benefit of visualisation should not obscure the crucial and irreplaceable importance of human expertise. As mentioned by an interviewee, “someone who is not familiar with the equipment or risks may not take good photos of work sites, as they will be unaware of high-risk situations or hazardous materials”. The simple choice of camera angle is significant: for example, a hazard may be linked to the cramped nature of a room, more so than the equipment in this room. In this example, a relevant photograph should seek a wide angle to show the work area rather than the equipment (pump, valve, motor).

Consequently, this is a mediation by the visualisation tool of an essentially human and organisational process, which begins with the recognition of the problem experienced by others, the awareness of its impact on the rest of the series, and continues with the desire to implement dialogue between stakeholders and related trade communities. The safety building process is above all human and organisational, or even “political” insofar as the groups of stakeholders involved can also have immediate positions and interests, i.e., directly compatible. Visualising work site situations helps make the risk tangible, concrete and directly assessable.

9.6 Conclusion

The study combines the characteristics and issues of high-risk industry, the challenges of occupational health and safety, the key role of design (prevention concepts derived from the BTP and Prevention through Design [1, 17] but also of cooperation and decision-making over the long term (management of projects and large-scale projects [2, 10, 14, 30, 32]) and the short term (notions of sensemaking [33], situation [7, 15, 29], etc.).

We attempted to combine this theoretical input with the empirical data collected to stress the importance of developing skills relating to “situated safety” for the company, i.e., the pragmatic understanding of occupational safety issues, generating interactions between legal constraints and processes on the one hand, and between the reality and specific characteristics of work sites on the other. These situated safety skills exist within the company and are very valuable. Thus, the resources in possession of these skills must be identified (often because of a dual work site/safety culture) and the organisational and managerial conditions required for their enhancement must be created. This enhancement can only occur on a sufficiently local scale so that the transfer of knowledge is directly connected with action, work, the “investigation” and solving of actual problems, in conjunction and co-creation with designers.

These visualisation, three-dimensional modelling or virtual reality tools may therefore be used during “action learning” sessions intended for designers newly assigned to this position (more traditional training) as well as more experienced designers (sessions more oriented towards group work and the “co-design” of operational solutions, combining the expertise of prevention experts with the knowledge of designers). Finally, it should be noted that visualisation tools cannot be a substitute for the expertise of prevention experts and trainers familiar with the reality of work sites. Similarly, tools such as photographic databases, videos and 3D models, augmented reality and virtual reality, should not be regarded as self-sufficient, but rather as a means of grounding the activity and mediating regulation and cooperation among different yet complementary communities of practice.

9.7 Ethics Statement

Informed consent was obtained from all participants in this study, and all data has been anonymised. The research protocol was approved by a manager in the research division of the company.