Human Behaviour in Fire: Challenges, Theory & Guidance

SPEAKER:

Michael Kinsey, Ph.D.
Executive Advisor
Movement Strategies (a GHD Company)

Dr Michael Kinsey is a Chartered Fire Engineer and Executive Advisor within Movement Strategies (a GHD Company). He has been involved in variety of commercial and research projects in both the UK and China for a range of building types including residential, office, airport, rail, stadium, and rolling stock design. He completed his PhD and postdoctoral research at the Fire Safety Engineering Group (FSEG) at the University of Greenwich, UK. He is an active researcher has led a range of research projects including exploring cognitive biases in decision making in emergencies/engineering, evacuation model debugging, and mental simulation of people movement. He is an active writer of scientific conference/journal papers associated with evacuation modelling and human behaviour in fire. Michael is a co-author of the SFPE Handbook Evacuation Modelling Chapter (6th Edition), co-author of the 2nd Edition of the Society of Fire Protection Engineers Guide to Human Behaviour, and is on the ISO TC92/SC4/WG4 developing international protocols for evacuation model verification/validation.

SYNOPSIS:

Almost all buildings are designed for people to do things within them, and most are designed with the express intention of serving people in some way. Despite this, the vast majority of time spent by design teams in the built environment traditionally has focused on the specification of the physical parts of the building and systems. These are commonly predicated on implied idealised assumptions about how people will behave or interact with specific aspects in a building, commonly in very simplistic, non-rigorous, and uninformed fashion. In the last two to three decades, improvements in the spread and quality of education along with developments in computational tools has resulted in improvements with the structured and explicit consideration of human behaviour in fire within fire engineering. This talk will give an overview of the motivations for considering human behaviour in fire within fire engineering, challenges with associated research, human behaviour in fire theory, and methods of application with limitations and tips given for each.

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