HSE Management for a Sound Work Environment: Strategies for Improving Health Safety and Environmental Indicators through Ergonomic Design Thinking

Ergonomic Design Thinking (EDT) is a project management methodology that takes advantage of two important concepts or themes in carrying out project actions. The first is Design Thinking itself, a project management approach originally proposed by Tim Brown, who knew beforehand the full potential of design tools, techniques and maybe we should add idiosyncrasies. Designers have “their own way” of following through and carrying out issues such as deadlines and sequences, for example. This logic is similar to another important theme: ergonomics. The main objective of ergonomics is adapting work systems to workers themselves. By doing so, its professionals dig deep into the social technical fabric of a workplace and use recurrent and iterative strategies in order to search for a perfect fit for a given workstation. EDT as a modeling guide for workspace projects have been used in Brazil for quite some time. This text outlines an interesting experience in which EDT was used as a conception tool in building a new health safety and environmental (HSE) management system model for construction sites. A real case–an ongoing construction work–was used to contextualize the experiment and better define the various instruments of this HSE model. Due to the work environment and predominant job characteristics available, the EDT approach did quite well in terms of serving its project management purpose, as it was confirmed when the new system became fully functional

Chapter HSE Management for a Sound Work Environment: Strategies for Improving Health Safety and Environmental Indicators through Ergonomic Design Thinking

The environmental effect of ground-borne vibration and noise generated by urban rail transit systems is a growing concern in urban areas. This chapter reviews, synthesizes and benchmarks new understandings related to railway vibration and associated airborne and ground-borne noise. The aim is to provide new thinking on how to predict noise and vibration levels from numerical modelling and from readily available conventional site investigation data. Recent results from some European metropoles (Brussels, Athens, etc.) are used to illustrate the dynamic effect of urban railway vehicles. It is also proved that train type and the contact conditions at the wheel/rail interface can be influential in the generation of vibration. The use of noise-mapping-based results offers an efficient and rapid way to evaluate mitigation measures in a large scale regarding the noise exposure generated to dense urban railway traffic. It is hoped that this information may provide assistance to future researchers attempting to simulate railway vehicle vibration and noise