Why your fire safety instructions don’t work

Photo: To understand users’ needs, you can use methods such as observations, interviews, focus groups, or questionnaires.

If you want people to comply with fire safety rules in a building, you need to understand their behavior and make it easier for them to do the right thing. User involvement and a focus on building design are therefore the path to a safer building.

Door wedges in fire doors, storage in technical rooms, furniture in escape corridors, or prams in stairwells are just some of the many fire safety violations found in buildings. What they all have in common is that they solve a practical problem for one or more building users. Too often, users’ needs were not sufficiently considered when the building was designed. And that backfires, because people will simply come up with their own fire-hazardous solutions.

This and much more was emphasized when DBI – the Danish Institute of Fire and Security Technology recently hosted two free events for building owners. DBI brought together a fire safety consultant, an anthropologist, and a strategic design expert, who jointly guided participants through fire regulations, user understanding, and behavioral design.

”A building may be designed to be highly fire-safe, but in practice, fire safety depends on whether or not the rules are followed. It is the building owner’s responsibility to instruct users so they comply with the rules and know what to do in case of fire. The list of things they need to be instructed in is long and includes everything from escape routes, placement of firefighting equipment, and open fire doors to rules regarding waste, smoking, candles, combustible materials in escape corridors, etc.,” said Alexander Skaarup-Bertelsen, Fire Safety Consultant at DBI, and continued:

”The complexity of the Danish Building Regulations has increased, and for many people this can clash with everyday challenges. In addition, requirements for instructing building users have been tightened. But when is a user sufficiently instructed? In reality, you may only find out the day a fire occurs – and the insurance company will likely have an opinion as well.”

Read also: How to encourage fire-safe behaviour in buildings

The building regulations are well thought out

Although it may not always be obvious to building users, according to Alexander Skaarup-Bertelsen there is, indeed, a rationale behind the Building Regulations:

”The rules are not made for their own sake. But they do not always align with the logic and efficiency needs people have in their daily lives. If the rules are too cumbersome, poorly communicated, or difficult to understand, the risk of non-compliance increases,” he said, adding:

”If you need to go in and out of a door many times, it’s easy to wedge it open. And if there is no storage room, you might use the technical room instead. Often, buildings are not designed to meet users’ needs in terms of space and storage. Furthermore, lack of knowledge about fire safety also plays a role.”

Behavior makes sense to the individual

According to DBI Anthropologist Mette Marie Vad Karsten, simple information is rarely enough to change behavior. Instructions can be interpreted very differently, and people simply act based on what makes sense to them.

”People don’t break rules just to be difficult. They simply do what is easiest in the situation and what solves a concrete problem for them. If you want behavioral change, it does not help to remove the solution they have found without offering an alternative. Otherwise, they will just find other solutions that don’t work either,” she said, and continued:

”For an intervention to be effective, you need to understand why people act the way they do and reduce the gap between rules and reality. To understand users’ needs, you can use methods such as observations, interviews, focus groups, or questionnaires. These approaches make it possible to get to the core of people’s needs and motivations.”

Behavior and environment influence each other

If a property lacks storage space for prams, people may place them in the stairwell. Once one pram is there, it signals to others that this is the place for prams.

”In this case, the environment does not match users’ needs. The environment influences behavior, just as behavior shapes the environment. In this way, environment and behavior are interconnected and influence each other,” explained Sidse Ansbjerg Bordal, Strategic Design Lead at DBI, and elaborated:

”When rules are broken, it is often a design problem. Therefore, we need to change the environment to change behavior. It must be easy to do the right thing and difficult to do the wrong thing. We also need to recognize that people are different and have different needs. Solutions must work across user groups and make sense to many different people; otherwise they won’t work in practice.”

Read also: Building operation must be considered during the design phase

Solutions must be developed together

According to Sidse Ansbjerg Bordal and Mette Marie Vad Karsten, solutions should not be imposed on people but developed with them:

”Users must be actively involved, their different perspectives brought into play, and solutions developed collaboratively. Co-creation opens up a broader range of possibilities and leads to solutions that work and make sense for as many people as possible. At the same time, it strengthens ownership and reduces resistance,” said Sidse Ansbjerg Bordal, adding:

”A structured approach to co-creation can, for example, involve workshops.”

Implementing new solutions

New solutions should initially be seen as hypotheses about what works. It is therefore a good idea to test them as prototypes over a limited period of time before rolling them out at full scale.

”New solutions do not implement themselves. Our advice is: Test the solution first, then evaluate it, and adjust as needed before scaling,” said Mette Marie Vad Karsten, concluding:

”However, don’t expect everything to just run smoothly afterwards. The world changes, solutions become outdated, and this type of solution also requires operation, monitoring, and maintenance. You should therefore continuously check whether the solutions still work and support the desired behavior, or whether updates are needed.”