Future Directions for Sociotechnical Systems and Safety

Abstract

The Sociotechnical Systems (STS) approach has had an enormous influence on both research and practice within occupational safety and has been applied across a range of domains including construction, healthcare, transportation and manufacturing. This panel will discuss the outcomes from a Hopkinton Conference on STS and Safety held at the Liberty Mutual Research Institute for Safety in Hopkinton, Massachusetts on October 18-19^th 2012. The conference brought together a group of invited international researchers from 20 institutions in order to discuss current and future directions for sociotechnical systems and safety. The panel will focus on summarizing the main outcomes from these discussions, these include new directions for research and practice (Carayon on behalf of Hancock, Leveson, Noy, Sznelwar, van Hootegem and Hettinger); current and future requirements for development of methods and tools within STS and safety (Waterson on behalf of Cooke, Roth, Militello, Robertson and Stanton); the scope for computer-based modeling and simulation of complex sociotechnical systems (Alex Kirlik on behalf of Buckle, Goh and Hettinger); the application of a framework from a dynamical systems framework to the problem of communication and decision-making in complex systems (Dainoff on behalf of Flach, Carroll, Hamilton and Sanderson); and, the identification of the key sociotechnical attributes of safe systems (Kleiner on behalf of DeJoy, Hettinger, Huang and Love).