ABSTRACT
Safety is defined as “The state of being protected from or guarded against hurt or injury; freedom from danger” (Oxford Dictionary, 2016) whilst behavioural safety describes a behaviour that is directly related to increasing safety such as wearing a crash or safety helmet or driving in a responsible manner. There has been a large uptake of behavioural safety approaches over the past decade in a wide range of applications including industrial, occupational, healthcare and even social environments. Such approaches are based on the findings that a significant proportion of accidents are primarily caused by the behaviour of human operators rather than being an artefact of poor or faulty product design.
The concept of designing for behavioural safety has two ways of addressing this issue: on the one hand, it comprizes design of facilities, processes and products in a way that minimizes hazards and risks to the people who will use them. On the other hand, it can involve guiding people to change their behaviour in certain ways to establish or maintain personal safety indirectly through design. In this chapter, some of the important theoretical models of designing for safety are described along with case studies of how the theory has been applied in different environments.
