A case study on the development of our safety infographics, for our environmental / remediation projects abroad. With these infographics we try to bring our safety vision further

1. 30 MARCH 2016
Case study

2. MARCH 2016 31
Case study
Words: STEPHEN MARRIOTT
Dutch art students have helped an environmental
consultancy raise hazard awareness among site
workers worldwide
Universal
language
W
hat would you do if you had to alert local workers in
multiple countries, many of them unable to read even
their native languages, to serious safety and health
threats on remote sites? If you were imaginative and
watched the right TV shows, you might come up with a suite of visual
instructions like those on the following pages that are as striking as
they are functional.
The man who did just that is Daan van Wieringen, safety manager
at Dutch environmental consultancy Tauw.
Tauw’s specialisms include water and soil remediation projects in
former war zones and contaminated industrial sites, operating at as
many as 50 locations a year around the globe.
“There are small projects with ten local workers and a Tauw
project manager,” says Amsterdam-based van Wieringen, “ranging
up to a major European construction project where there were almost
1,000 people on site.”
One recent example he offers involved 30 local workers in
Vietnam cleaning soil contaminated by pesticide dumps left from the
Vietcong’s attempts to control rampant mosquito-borne malaria in
the 1970s.
“Our pesticides projects are sometimes in the same areas as
ammunition stockpiles left over from the war buried in the soil,” he
says, “so we have to train people in multiple hazards. There’s a big
overlap between those two environmental issues.”

3. 32 MARCH 2016
Case study
Workers receive a site
induction with the
pictograms in São Tomé
and Principe
Off the telly
Until recently, Tauw would supply local workers with
personal protective equipment (PPE) and train them to
use it but with only limited success.
“We had traditional Powerpoint decks of 50 or
60 slides and it was difficult to keep the workers’
attention,” says van Wieringen. It was also difficult to
run the presentations on remote sites with no rest room
or electricity and everyone was sitting round one laptop.
“We thought there must be something else we
could do; some way to make it more practical.” While
he was pondering the problem in 2013 he watched a
TV quiz that featured short animated sequences from
students at Utrecht’s University of the Arts.
“I thought ‘that’s it!’,” he recalls. “If there’s
anybody who could transmit our message in a different
way it could be art students. They would have a fresh
approach.”
He contacted the university and explained his idea
to the teaching staff who enlisted a group of art and
design students with a broad brief to come up with a
new form of hazard communication.
“We didn’t ask for infographics,” he says. “It was
a process. We gave them the basic conditions: remote
locations, no electricity, people who don’t read English,
some can’t read at all; a variety of hazards.
“I gave them photos of our projects and they began
to think of communication tools. We provided technical
details on all the hazards.”
Part of the brief was to create messages that were
not dictatorial but showed the consequences of unsafe
behaviour and exposure to hazardous materials, to
encourage workers to want to avoid them.
Tauw also had strong links with the International
Environmental University in Kampf Lintfort, Germany
where one of the professors had previously worked for
the company. “Some of their students do internships
with us,” says van Wieringen. “So we thought it would
be a good idea to get them involved too, both the
environmental students and some from the psychology
department.”
The two groups of students worked from the end of
2013 into 2014.
Brief reminder
“They struggled at first,” admits van Wieringen,
referring to the Utrecht group. “They are art students
and wanted to make art. They didn’t recognise the
limitations immediately.”
One student created beautiful designs using paper
collage, he says, but they would have been impossible
to reproduce and too delicate to transport to the
remote sites.
A reminder from Tauw of the restrictions refocused
their attention and the idea of printed boards with

4. MARCH 2016 33
Case study
Wieringen says. To reinforce the messages, copies with
magnetic backing were put up on the fencing next to
the site entrance.
Since then the cards have been used on projects in
the former Soviet countries and Africa’s smallest state
São Tomé and Principe.
Van Wieringen says it is difficult to measure
precisely the effect of the infographics. “But it’s clear
that people were more focused.”
Well covered
“One of the big issues is secondary exposure,” he
says. “If workers don’t dispose of their PPE properly
after working around pesticides, they can expose their
families.
“We believe the messages on the infographics
about not taking dirty clothes home has reduced that
exposure.”
“It’s about creating awareness,” he adds. “We had
anecdotes from our African projects about the coveralls
we give the workers. At the end of the project those
are effectively chemical waste and should be burned.
We heard that the disposal bags were being reopened
and the elders in the villages were wearing them; they
became a kind of status symbol.
“We are trying with the infographics to cut
that kind of reuse of PPE. So some of the pictures
are deliberately shocking, showing a sick child or
mother.”
One picture shows a young boy carrying a soil
auger. “It’s to warn against using child labour,” van
Wieringen explains. “In the first version the man
standing next to the boy was a white man, because it
made better graphic contrast. But it’s not good to have
a white man saying a child cannot work, because then
hazard control pictograms emerged, that could be
carried in a bag to sites and displayed to workers.
The students were keen to expand the graphics into
various media including animation, but van Wieringen
says he kept them focused on the most useful format.
“I said let’s do one thing very well rather than four
things not so well.”
As the infographics took shape, the students began
to develop a visual shorthand that carries through
the finished images, with coloured blotches to
represent contamination on skin or clothing and the
soil sampling auger, a common tool on Tauw sites, to
represent hazardous equipment.
The messages they convey explain everything
from the necessity to wear PPE – the issue that had
first exercised van Wieringen – and food hygiene to
electrical isolation and correct disposal of hazardous
waste.
The German group of psychology and
environmental students was experimenting separately
with ideas including a card game to alert workers
to hazards, but these never really worked, says van
Wieringen. “They were difficult to understand and
needed a lot of explanation, and people wouldn’t have
understood.”
Two weeks after the students made their final
presentation to Tauw, the pictogram boards, covering
28 main hazards, were printed A3 size
and taken to the remediation
project in Vietnam.
“We used them as part
of train-the-trainer
sessions, so people
could carry out site
inductions,” van
Daan van Wieringen
Tauw safety manager

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Case study
The pictograms
displayed on a site
fence in Vietnam
it’s white men telling everybody how to behave. It’s
little details that are important.”
Some of the early cards had multiple messages but
now they have only one per card, “which makes the
tool easier to use”.
“You can ask the workers to combine several info
graphics into one scenario, so you get an interactive
element.”
He says in a presentation to a meeting of the Dutch
OSH professionals body, groups of practitioners
became really engaged in sequencing the boards and
discussing their impact.
The infographics were included in the Vietnamese
national environmental safety standard for the
clean-up of persistent organic pollutants. Now, one
of Tauw’s largest clients, a major chemicals concern,
has asked it to use the visual standards on a large
project in Africa this year.
A second group of German students, working
after the Utrecht group developed the infographics,
researched ways to put the pictures on something
that could be given to workers on the projects to take
home. Initially, as with the art students, their grasp
of the conditions in some of the countries was loose.
“They wanted to produce them on a USB memory
stick,” says van Wieringen, “but since nobody has
computers there, that wouldn’t have worked.”
Eventually they decided to print the images on
towels that could be compressed into pellet form and
expand in water. “That’s very convenient to transport
and very useful to the people who are given them,” he
says. “It reinforces the site messages at home.”
The towels are now being produced and he hopes to
use them on a couple of World Bank-funded projects
Tauw is due to work on to remove pesticide stockpiles
in Africa.
For van Wieringen, the experience of tasking
young creatives with a technical challenge has been
overwhelmingly positive. “I’d recommend it to anyone
who gets the chance,” he says. “Working with the
students brought such a fresh perspective.” ●