Keynote Speaker 1
| Title | Safety Differently: Ergonomics For A New Era |
| Speaker | Dr. Sidney Dekker, Griffith University |
Biography
Sidney Dekker (PhD Ohio State University, USA, 1996) is currently Professor at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia, where he runs the Safety Science Innovation Lab. He is also Honorary Professor of psychology at The University of Queensland. Previously, he was Professor of human factors and system safety at Lund University in Sweden, where he directed the Leonardo da Vinci Laboratory for Complexity and Systems Thinking, and learned to fly the Boeing 737, working part-time as an airline pilot out of Copenhagen.
He has won worldwide acclaim for his groundbreaking work in human factors and safety, and is best-selling author of, most recently, Second Victim (2013), Just Culture (2012), Drift into Failure (2011), and Patient Safety (2011). His latest book is Safety Differently (2014). More at sidneydekker.com
Abstract
The unrelenting pace of technological change and growth of complexity in our societies call for an invigoration of ergonomic thinking. A kind of thinking that sees the human as a source of diversity, resilience, insight, creativity and wisdom about performance and safety-not as a source of risk that undermines otherwise safe, well-designed systems. In this New Era, ergonomics should move:
from studying human limitations-and seeing people as a problem to control, to studying human strengths-and seeing people as a solution to harness;
from a Cartesian-Newtonian language of linear cause-effect relationships, of static metaphors and individual components, to a language of complexity, change and evolution, holism and relationships
from vocabularies of control, constraint and human deficit, to new vocabularies of empowerment, diversity and human opportunity
