B4 · 2024 · System design
Kavach
A safety and communication system for construction sites: wearables at the gate, alcohol checks, SOS with location and medical history, weather in the schedule, and one dashboard for the people who have to act.
Read the full write-up on Medium- What I did
- Research, the system map, roles and flows, information architecture, dashboard screens, first round of user testing.
- Result
- A complete system design with a business model canvas behind it. Four roles, one system. Designed, never built, and the screens never caught up to the system.
Timelines win over welfare every time
Construction is one of the highest-accident industries there is, and the fatalities are mostly preventable: falls, electrocution, being struck. The safety schemes exist. The workers are disconnected from them.
Timelines win over welfare every time the two compete
Four things sat under that. Compliance on site is poor, and there is no reliable way to know who is wearing what. Alcohol on site is well above national averages, and it tracks with stress, homesickness and bad living conditions for migrant workers rather than with a lack of rules. Emergencies move slowly, because information has to climb a hierarchy before anyone can act. And weather disrupts work while nobody plans around it, so it costs days, money and sometimes people.
Two more constraints shaped everything. Every role on site already reports upward, so the system had to fit that hierarchy and then shorten it where lives depend on it. And alcohol monitoring is a welfare problem before it is a discipline problem, so the design could not read as surveillance.
The worker never opens anything
The touchpoint is a wearable and a gate, not an app
Instead of A worker-facing app for check-in, safety and reporting
Gear detection happens at entry, before the site. Attendance and movement come off a digital ID or band. SOS is a physical trigger that already carries location and medical history.
After Nothing to remember, unlock or type, which is the only way it works for the people it is meant to protect.
Four roles, each seeing what it can act on
One system, four dashboards
Instead of One shared dashboard for everyone
A safety officer reviews attendance and gear breaches and assigns them to a contractor. A foreman files a machine failure. A contractor reviews and escalates. A builder sees the project's safety picture.
Giving everyone everything is how information ends up climbing the same chain it already climbs off-screen.
After Same data, four views, instead of reproducing the hierarchy problem on a screen.
Alcohol is a symptom, so the response is human
Detection alerts the supervisor, with the person's context attached
Instead of Automatic penalties
The research said alcohol use tracks with conditions: stress, homesickness, bad accommodation. If the cause is human the response has to be, or the system just becomes another thing to hide from.
After What happens next is a conversation, not a rule firing.
Alcohol is a symptom of conditions, so the response has to be human
Weather goes into the schedule, not a notification
Change what people are asked to do, rather than warning them
Instead of Weather warnings sent to phones
Warnings get ignored, especially by people whose job is to hit a date. The schedule is the thing that actually decides what happens on site, so that is where the weather has to live.
After A schedule that already accounts for tomorrow's rain is the only version that stops the accident.
Designed as a system, never built
The system, roles, flows and information architecture are complete, with a business model canvas behind them. We talked to the workers and not only to the safety officers, which is where the alcohol finding came from, and why the worker never has to open anything.
Time and workload showed in the visual layer, and the screens never caught up to the thinking behind them.
Two things I would reorder
Start the visual layer earlier. The system thinking was the hard part and it holds up, but a system people judge by its screens deserves screens given the same time.
And test with a real site crew before the safety officer. They are the ones it is for.