Design for Construction Safety: a Literature Review

The rapid growth of Chinese economy calls for massive development of infrastructures and assets. While it brings opportunities to construction industry, the poor safety performance arouses increasing attentions.Construction is one of the most hazardous industries in terms of the aggregate number of fatalities. Improving the safety of construction site through design practices upstream of the construction phase is the objective of the design for construction safety (DfCS) concept. Design professionals traditionally focus on the safety of the end user of the buildings or other facilities rather than those who will construct it. The constructor is positioned to promote safe work conditions and enable safe work practices. Globally, the DfCS concept has gained momentum as an intervention to improve construction site safety and an extensive list of related articles can be found in top journals. This paper is a review of some of the literatures related to the concept. Main contents of this paper are: definition of the concept, harriers and opportunities of application, relationship between design and construction site safety, existed design suggestion and tools, methods of foregoing investigations. Two typical examples of DfCS researches are enumerated in the end.