The visual side of safety
Résumé
In this chapter, I address what I believe to be a complementary discussion for this book on the relationship between safety, models and culture. One interesting angle of analysis is indeed to focus on drawings, graphics or visualisations that have supported powerful heuristics designed to channel ways of thinking the complex topic of safety, analytically and communicatively. In order to build the argument about the importance of how drawings, pictures or visualisation structure the understanding of safety individuals and become a support for action, some illustrations are offered, covering different categories of actors populating high risks systems, from process operators to engineers and managers. From there, a discussion of more research oriented drawings is developed, based on two illustrations: the Heinrich-Bird pyramid and the Swiss Cheese Model. They are considered from several analytical categories including their generic, normative, metaphoric aspects along with their status as inscriptions, boundary and performative objects.