Canadian Occupational Safety

22 www.cos-mag.com Canadian Occupational Safety I sat back-to-back with a perfect stranger and described the small, wooden zebra that I held in my hand. "It has a long head in the shape of an oval, with a skinny neck and a long, rectangular body. The arms are bent like boomerangs on each side," I said to my partner, who was attempting to draw the zebra on a pad of paper. Once our two minutes were up, we revealed the object and drawing to each other. I thought he did a pretty good job, but it was glaringly obvious the parts of the zebra I had completely failed to mention — they were notably missing from the drawing. Doug Pontsler, chairman and managing director of COVE: Center of Visual Expertise based in Toledo, Ohio, explained to us that this exer- cise demonstrated the difficulty of communicating without a common language and methodical process. Then, we moved on to a photo- graph of a construction site and Pontsler asked us what we noticed first. I noticed a man in a hi-vis yellow jacket, while my partner noticed the pylon in the foreground. This dem- onstrated that we all have a natural tendency to look for specific things that are shaped by our expectations, experiences and biases. We were working our way through the visual literacy pavilion at the National Safety Council's Congress and Expo in October in Houston. The exhibit was designed to teach delegates about visual literacy and explain how this concept can have a positive impact on workplace safety. The Toledo Museum of A r t describes visual literacy as being able to read, comprehend and write visual language. To be able to read visual language, an individual must scan a picture or area then observe key details in order to see the entire picture. To comprehend visual lan- guage, an individual must be able to describe the visual information in front of them and assign meaning to it. To write visual language, the indi- vidual responds to what they have seen and analyzed. "It's really about learning to see… It's about what you see, what it means and then what you do," says Pont- sler, a former vice-president of EHS at Owens Corning. "A huge portion of what we do from a safety stand- point is exactly that: It's being able to see what's in front of us, being able to interpret what that means from a safety perspective and take the appropriate actions." SAFETY APPLICATIONS Two Cummins sites in New York and Ohio trained some of its front-line workers on visual literacy as part of a pilot project with the Campbell Insti- tute, based in Itasca, Ill. The company — which manufacturers generators and engines, and has 58,600 work- ers around the world — experienced a 30 per cent increase in the risk score Strong visual literacy skills can improve hazard identification By Amanda Silliker PHOTOS: TOLEDO MUSEUM OF ART for the area of the site that had been trained on visual literacy. "This was great news because they've now identified things that they hadn't identified or acted on before, and now they can fix those things," Pontsler says. As of March 2018, when the Camp- bell Institute checked-in with pilot participants, 225 Cummins workers at the Jamestown, N.Y. location had been trained on visual literacy. They identified 132 issues using the ele- ments of art — line, shape, colour, texture and space — and submitted and corrected 25 hazards. Cummins has been using visual lit- eracy mostly for hazard identification and Kelli Smith, occupational health director, has been very pleased with the outcomes. "We really realized that visual lit- eracy helped employees to better see hazards that they otherwise wouldn't be noticing on a day-to-day basis; things they are so familiar with they might just walk by," she says. The majority of the hazards have been identified through paying atten- tion to line and colour. At one of its locations, workers trained in visual literacy noticed that the rise and run of some steps in the plant were not to code, the treads of the steps were run down and there was a handrail missing on one side. "This is a work station they work around day in and day out. When they applied the visual literacy principles,

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