Using Design Thinking to improve worker safety in manufacturing
Co-Speaker
18 Minute Keynote
Improving workforce safety is a priority for all responsible organizations, even as they often struggle to balance safety and productivity demands. While process improvements and state of art infrastructure would help reduce accidents, these interventions were not enough. We, Pensaar Design, wanted to know whether new approaches to workplace safety and worker training may be able to help keep more workers safe. What emerged was the need to better understand worker and manager attitudes and behaviors toward safety. The hope was that the human-centered ethos of design thinking could help reframe this problem in ways that regular process improvements alone could not. This wasn’t a small endeavor. Design thinking is an in-depth process of research, ideation, and experimentation. It requires patience and time to see improvement. Applying it to an issue as important as worker safety required careful planning and the participation of many individuals, which adds to the effort’s costs. But we found that by better understanding worker assumptions and engaging in rapid experimentation, this kind of behavioral work can be a potent tool to make improvements to worker safety.
About The Speaker
Deepa Bachu is the Co-Founder and CEO of Pensaar, a Design Strategy and Innovation Consulting firm that uses the collaborative and human- centered approach of design thinking to create experiences that will be awesome, by design. She is a design and product leader who spent the last 25 years at large multinationals and Tech start-ups leading their Design, Innovation, and Product Management functions. Her passion is to transform customers’ lives by creating products that solve their biggest unmet needs. Products that make the customers’ lives better and deliver unexpected delight!
Deepa helped pioneer Design Thinking at Intuit working closely with Intuit Co-Founder, Scott Cook. One of the many projects she led, FASAL, went on to become an HBR Case study & one of their Top 10 Innovation ‘must reads’. Fasal helps farmers gain a competitive edge in the marketplace by providing them with pricing and other agricultural advisory information.
In her professional career, Deepa has effectively handled a variety of responsibilities and roles across Experience Design, Innovation, Product Management, General Management, and Product Development
Her work has been published by several publications and most recently by Harvard Business Review: https://hbr.org/2021/11/using-design-thinking-to-improve-worker-safety-in-manufacturing