Socio-technical habitat

The term habitat normally refers to the area or environment in which an organism or ecological community lives or occurs. By extension, it has also been used to describe human-made environments where people can live and work for an extended period of time, for instance an underwater habitat or a space settlement. A socio-technical habitat can be defined as a set of mutually dependent socio-technical systems that is necessary to sustain a range of individual and collective human activities (life and work). While a workplace (such as an office, a hospital, or a factory) can be described as a socio-technical system when it is considered by itself, the sustained functioning always depends on services provided by other socio-technical systems, for instance in relation to transportation of the workforce, distribution of products, communication and control, etc. The combined socio-technical systems constitute a socio-technical habitat. 

Since the socio-technical habitats on which our daily life depends continue to become more and more complicated, remaining with a Safety-I approach will become inadequate in the long nm, if that has not already happened. Complementing current safety management practices with a Safety-II perspective should therefore... 

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