Safety Cultures, Safety Models by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319951294
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

2 The Visual Side of Safety

In the past few decades, history, sociology, anthropology and the philosophy of science and technology have engaged in a strong and sustained interest for the world of visualisations (Coopmans, Vertesi, Lynch, & Woolgar, 2014). Latour has been one of the early promoters of this interest for the materialisation of scientific practices (Latour, 1986; Latour & Woolgar, 1979). In “Thinking with eyes and hands”, Latour convincingly argued for paying greater attention to the diversity of what he described as “inscriptions”, these textual, graphic or computerised supports and traces of all sorts that scientists manipulate daily to describe, to approach, to depict, to comprehend, to conceptualise, to explain, to anticipate, to predict phenomena. They provide the concrete visual support through which one can build or construct networks of inscriptions within which an understanding of phenomena is possible, and a world enacted.

Of course, beyond the practice of science, in our current image-saturated culture, including the issue of big data, people rely on a kind of visual literacy which consists of constructing meaning from everything we see. The notion of visual literacy—derived from the notion of literacy initially developed to investigate the relation between thinking and writing (Olson, 1998)—is an ability developed from early age to adulthood in order to evolve and to cope in an environment in which a very good part of our information is received through our eyes.

Translated into the daily practices of the process industry, one can indeed observe that there is a world of images made of texts, signs, diagrams (including PID: process instruments diagrams), alarms, thresholds, schemas, tables, pictograms, posters, procedures, schedules, Gantt charts, indicators, maps, logs, forms, etc., supporting and guiding actions (Le Coze, 2015; Le Coze, forthcoming). These pictures are based on graphical features such as lines, shapes, colours, spaces and textures but also balance, variety, movement, proportion, etc. Here are some examples and selections of pictures, drawings and graphics which structure the environment of safety management in high risk systems. I indicate artefacts which primarily concern the activity of different actors of safety critical systems.

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