Visualising Safety
Résumé
This chapter argues that visualisations have played and continue to play a central role and discusses a complementary topic targeting the conceptual developments of safety research. In safety research, some works have explored the importance of visualising. One way to convince of the importance of visualisation is to propose a very brief tour of safety research. Enduring visualisations in safety research are therefore constructive, artistic, generic, normative, metaphorical, but they also exhibit those properties defined as inscription, boundary; they are performative objects. The same can be said about Rasmussen’s sociotechnical system view. One proposition is to move away visually from different kinds of hierarchical structures to stress certain aspects of our understanding of sociotechnical systems that rely on contemporary notions such as constructivism, network and complexity. Complex issues such as identifying and comparing high-risk systems, conceptualising sociotechnical systems and capturing safety dynamics have all been supported by drawings.