The construction workers at Skanska wake up early to build the infrastructure our society depends on. Many of them are building tunnels, working in the dark, the dust, and the noise, surrounded by potentially unstable rock, and big machines. Every day, these people must return home safely.

Fellesblikket, translated to "a shared gaze", investigates how design can make the local rationality of tunnel workers visible - the reasoning and judgement in safety that makes sense inside the tunnel and its context, but rarely reaches the decision-makers.

The project grew out of fieldwork at construction sites, where I observed tunnel workers, followed shift teams through a visual approach. I also analysed incident reports and the systems around safety work through a systems thinking lens. Skanska wanted to be better at compliance within the safety procedures to avoid critical incidents. However, what I found surprised me - the workers were already handling it. Behind the scenes, they had quietly developed their own ways of navigating the gap between formal safety procedures and tunnel reality.

The rules and procedures were incident-focused and uniform, and they didn't fit the work as it was actually done. The real problem wasn't compliance, it was somewhere else. The knowledge that actually keeps people safe - the coffee talks, the in-between moments, the team, the situational awareness and the embodied knowledge. This never makes it back up to the people writing the rules and the procedures. Moreover, getting the workers to share it directly is its own challenge. Trust is built in the team, not on paper. A prototype that tried to capture this got almost no responses. The silence was the finding. Formal systems are built for sending, not for listening. This shifted everything: the design target was not the workers, but the decision-makers. 

The outcome is a short animated film - a vision set in a near-future 2031 - aimed at decision-makers, and pointing somewhere new. Through three design concepts, it shows what safety culture could look like if it were built around collective knowledge rather than individual compliance. The shared gaze already existed, quietly, between the workers, but it never reached the people who needed to see it. Fellesblikket is a creation, and an argument, that flips the question of who the real safety expert is.

Collaboration with Skanska Norge