Augmented Health and Safety: Exploring Future Scenarios through Design Fiction

Abstract

Workers' health and safety is a major concern for the energy industry. Emerging and future technologies have the potential to deeply improve this field, and to make the workplace safer and healthier, especially if applied in concert. However, this transformation is difficult to envision by energy companies, which are tied to well-established rules, processes and solutions. This paper presents Augmented health and safety: Future Vision, a project we performed in collaboration with a worldwide energy company, to envision how emerging technologies may transform health and safety practices in the energy industry in the near future. The project aims at enabling dialogue and foster change by encouraging the development and adoption of solutions based on new technologies. By a design fiction approach, we designed and prototyped an ecosystem of physical and digital solutions for health and safety problems aimed at presenting future scenarios and triggering discussion about how to improve workplaces. Design fiction turned out to be an effective tool for enabling dialogue and inspiring change within companies.