Designing safety from the start: A conversation with Safety Advisor, Vito Ungaro

After delivering a training session on Safety by Design, we sat down with our trainer to reflect on the key messages, challenges, and insights that emerged.

What was the main objective of the training about Safety by Design?

The goal was really to raise awareness around one fundamental idea: safety starts much earlier than we usually think.

When you design a machine or a process properly from the beginning, you can already eliminate a large number of risks, or at least significantly reduce workers’ exposure to them. 

Too often, safety is addressed afterward, once something has gone wrong. What we wanted to highlight is that many accidents can actually be prevented at the design stage.

You say we rely a lot on the notion of “human error.” Why is that something you challenge?

Because it’s often the easy explanation. Of course, errors are human, that’s true. But if we stop there, we miss a big part of the picture.

What we explored with participants is this: how can we design systems so that errors are less likely to happen in the first place? Or even better, so that people can’t make certain mistakes because the process guides them in the right direction.

That means putting in place preventive measures, simplifying actions as much as possible, and designing processes that are clear and intuitive. In the end, it’s not about blaming people, it’s about supporting them through design.

What role does simplicity play in safety?

A major one. The more complex a system is, the more opportunities there are for something to go wrong.

Of course, some machines are inherently complex. But even then, the way operators interact with them should be as simple as possible. 

If a process is easy to understand and to follow, you reduce uncertainty and therefore risk. Designing for simplicity is, in many cases, designing for safety.

You also insisted on the idea that safety is never “finished.” Can you elaborate?

Yes, that’s a key message. Designing a machine or a process is not a one-and-done exercise.

Even if everything looks good on paper and at launch, reality always brings new insights. That’s where near misses become extremely valuable. 

A near miss is not just a “non-event”. It’s actually a learning opportunity. It should feed a continuous improvement process.

So the idea is to create a loop: you design, you implement, you observe, you learn, and you improve. And that cycle never really stops.

This seems to involve many different roles in an organization. Who should be part of this approach?

Everyone, really. That’s why we emphasized multidisciplinarity so much during the training.

You have prevention advisors who identify potential gaps, engineers who design the systems, HSE professionals who bring a risk-based perspective, and of course the workers themselves, who are directly exposed to the reality on the ground.

Each of them sees something different. When you bring those perspectives together early in the design phase, you significantly improve the quality (and safety) of the outcome.

Are these design ideas typically complex to implement?

Not always, that’s what makes it even more interesting.

A lot of the suggestions fall into what we call “quick wins.” They don’t require major investments or large transformation programs. Sometimes, small adjustments can make a big difference in terms of safety and efficiency.

And that’s also an important message for management: improving safety doesn’t always mean heavy costs. It can be about making smarter design choices.

If you had to leave organizations with one key takeaway, what would it be?

That improving safety is not about adding more and more rules.

It’s about designing systems where the right action becomes the easiest, and sometimes the only option. When you reach that point, you move from reacting to problems to preventing them. And that’s where real progress happens.