NZ company wins major international environmental award

New Zealand company wins major international environmental design award

An innovative installation designed to promote health and safety awareness amongst staff working on Auckland’s Victoria Park tunnel construction programme has won a major international environmental design award.

“The installation has had a huge impact on everyone working on the Victoria Park project,” Fletcher Engineering Environment, Health and Safety Divisional Manager Stuart Chapman says. “It is integral to our health and safety promotion on site, which has seen lost time injury frequency decline from 1.15 per 100,000 man hours to 0.48 since the campaign started.”

The judges of the prestigious Society for Environmental Graphic Design awards said the New Zealand installation was “a grand evolution of the heartless warning sign…sophisticated, clever, easy, and touching.”

The installation is prominently positioned around site workers’ facilities that construction staff pass at the beginning of work each day. It includes a series of graphics with real life stories of how workers’ lives have been affected by accidents, x-rays of injuries, a video interview with a seriously injured worker, and a display which helps staff see safety in the context of the impact on workers’ families.

The final element in the installation is a mirrored surface which allows workers to ‘put themselves in the picture’ and check that they are equipped with vital personal protection equipment as they enter the site.

Created by design and brand agency Studio Alexander, the installation has already scooped New Zealand’s supreme Best award for graphics, and featured in the Victoria Park Alliance’s award winning entry to the New Zealand Workplace Health and Safety Awards.

“It is always good to see that what we are doing here measures up to the highest international standards,” Studio Alexander managing director Kate Alexander says. “For our team, the results achieved in the workplace for the client are inspiring. We feel privileged to have contributed to such a successful programme.”

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