Identifying Responsibilities of Interior Designers for Construction Workers’ Safety

Abstract

Occupational hazards and accidents in construction job sites have been a reason for concern over the years. Accordingly, considerable amount of investigations have been directed at identifying the causes responsible for the hazards and the accidents. Recent investigations have identified associations between the decisions taken by the designers during the design phase to the occupational hazards and accidents occurring downstream. Based on these findings, an intervention that is gaining popularity is the concept of Design for Safety (DfS). So far, majority of the effort in the field of DfS has been targeted toward the designers in general. This paper focusses on the role of the interior design professionals on workers’ safety and health needs. 60 accident reports extracted from OSHA’s Integrated Management Information System database were analyzed to identify the root-causes of the accidents. From the list of identified root causes, the ones that could be addressed during the design phase were segregated. It was found that majority of the root causes that resulted to accidents could be controlled by the interior design professionals during the design phase.