Dr Jonathan D Sime: a review of his principal works and their contribution to Fire Engineering and Fire Safety

Introduction

Jonathon Sime was an academic and consultant who worked in the field of environmental psychology (EP). He completed his Doctoral thesis “Escape behaviour in fires: panic or affiliation” in 1984 having been supervised by David Canter. Sime later worked with Canter and many other researchers in various fields who worked in disciplines that overlapped the boundaries of EP (e.g. Proulx, Galea and Ozel). He held a number of Research Fellowships and visiting lectureships and, in 1999, he accepted the post of Visiting Professor in the Department of the Built Environment at the University of Ulster. Sime contributed a significant number of papers and reports to the body of literature concerned with EP before he suddenly died in 2001, aged 50.

What is EP?

EP is a field of study that seeks to describe the interactions between human behaviour and the built environment. Before the emergence of the field, humans were characterised as automatic respondents to cues and clues of fire and in the built environment e.g. safety signs and fire effluents. Sime (1999) encapsulated his view of EP in a review essay entitled “What is Environmental Psychology? Texts, Content and Context” in which he acknowledges that EP “is many things” but more pointedly states that, “The subtitle of this essay might have been ‘In Search of a Theory’ or a defining paradigm”.

Sime’s Approach

Sime was among a number of researchers in the 1970s who, as a result of their ‘people-based’ studies in distinct but related fields, believed that, in order to properly determine the conditions necessary for a safe evacuation, a full appreciation of the interactions between the fire, its location and the affected people must be the target for which researchers must aim. Sime later identified the 3 relevant factors as: the Fire, the Setting and the Occupancy (the F-S-O relationship) (Sime, 2001).

One of the key features of his approach was that Sime sought to redefine occupancy in terms of the individual and their immediate environment rather than the traditional view of occupancy being the number of people within the hazard area with averaged or modal capabilities. Thus, the occupancy would change with every change in emotional state that affected the individual’s ability to effect an escape and with every change in location or circumstances that aided or impeded the individual’s ability to escape.

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Transdisciplinarity

Over nearly 3 decades, Sime developed his theories; he initially concerned himself with ‘disasters’ generally (Sime, 1980) before tending towards dealing with fire and the built environment (Sime, 1985). His approach was to consistently question the conventional approach to research and to propose a ‘transdisciplinary’ approach that used applicable methods from one field and apply them to another and to seek meaningful, quantifiable relationships between scientific results and sociological findings. It should be noted that Sime’s intention was to work across, and in spite of, traditionally-observed disciplinary boundaries – something that would arguably disturb many academics and that, consequently, ...

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Transdisciplinarity

Sime (1995) signalled a more pragmatic presentation in stating in the introduction that, “This paper stresses the need to address the relationship between (A) design and engineering × (B) communications technology x (C) crowd management x (D) crowd behaviour and movement.” The statement simplifies the concept of transdisciplinarity from an academic level to almost a technical one. This is because he, by inference, challenges the reader to argue that there are no such relationships and then, having “spiked” any argument, gives the reader the objective of identifying and reconciling those interfaces. The acceptance of the premise invites analysis by both engineering and sociological methods – by default, creating an interface if one did not exist before and, in effect, perpetuating the approach and undermining the traditional disciplinary boundaries. This paper expanded upon Sime’s contribution to a book entitled “Design Against Fire: an Introduction to Fire Safety Engineering Design” (Sime, 1994) and was further elaborated upon in another literary contribution to “Fire Engineering and Emergency Planning Research and Applications” (Sime, 1996)

The Occupant Response Escape Time and Occupant Response Shelter Escape Time Models

In the narrower field of evacuation resulting from an alarm of fire, Sime’s major contribution was to construct an aspirational model that defined the relationships between the fire, the environment within which the fire is located and the occupants of that environment (Sime, 2001). This relationship is shown in Figure 1 (below).

Traditionally, fire had only been considered in one of 2 ways:

a. In terms of predictable and reproducible conditions based on mathematical relationship based on the results of empirical observations or scientific experiments : this necessarily only considered the environment and the fire (the F-S Relationship); or

b. By the application of psychological methods to the interactions between, separately, the occupants and the fire (the F-O relationship) and the environment (the S-O relationship).

Sime recognised the exclusive nature of the research methods to date i.e. that the was a conceptual barrier – not to mention a level of snobbery – between the scientific/technical researchers and those in the psychological field. This lack of obvious methodological overlap, or even interface, served perpetuate the apparent inability to adequately describe human behaviour and choices in terms of a simple formula.

Figure1: Representation of Relationships in Sime's ORSET Model - from (Sime, 2001)

The diagram (Figure 1 [above]) not only defines the relationships with the ORSET concept but also shows the potential interfaces available for development within the specific field that would further Sime’s quest for transdisciplinarity.

Sime’s work in attempting to form a framework for unifying the various strands of evacuation modelling culminated in his publication of a model that sought to, in his words, address “the relationship between people and settings in a situation of evolving duress. A primary goal is to bridge the gap between psychology and engineering.” (Sime, 2001). This model was given the title of the Occupant Response Shelter Escape Time (ORSET) model. It is noteworthy that Sime used these words because he tacitly acknowledged that there had been little progress since his initial hypothesis. Sime did not claim to have produced an all-encompassing theory: he was explicit that much more work was needed before a workable model was produced.

Sime goes on to further explore the relationships he suggests are required to quantify the Occupant Response Escape Time (ORET) (see Figure 3 below): this is treated separately from the timelines in Figure 2. While explaining that the logical calculation of the ORET would be a summation of what appear to be discrete, finite and therefore calculable factors (ORTpre + ORTmove + ORTway + Ttrav/flow), Sime states that each of the factors will be defined in terms of the building conditions and properties and that the phases will therefore impinge upon each other thus making the relationship something other than additive.

Figure 1: Occupant response shelter escape timeline (Sime, 2001)

Posthumous Collaboration

A significant commentary on Sime’s contribution to the development of the transdisciplinary approach was the paper written by Horlick-Jones (2004) based on conversations between the author and Sime. Horlicks valued Sime’s contribution to such an extent that he cited Sime as a co-author despite the paper having been written after Sime’s death. The paper examines the distinction between “multidisciplinary” approaches – that tend to be characteristic of the maintenance of disciplinary boundaries but that are geared to examination of a common issue – and transdisciplinary approaches that, as described above, use various methods drawn from a number of disciplines and apply them to the question without regard to disciplinary boundaries.

Figure 2: Occupancy risk inputs and ORET outputs (Sime 2001)

Even within the transdisciplinary category, Horlick-Jones identifies a hangover from traditional approaches in that he notes that there is a discontinuity between ‘hard’ (quantitative, numerical) and ‘soft’ (qualitative, subjective) methods. He cites an essentially semantic device used by Ravetz in 1971 (a publication known to Sime) where challenges are classified as ‘technical’ – corresponding to the application of disciplinary or multidisciplinary approaches – or as ‘practical’. The ‘practical’ problem is “in some sense, open-ended, necessitating exterior sources of specification and judgement” (Ravetz, 1971): this neatly opens the problem to analysis by both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ methods and provides an interface between the 2. This parallels Sime’s early work and provides an element of support and verification for his approach.

Conclusion

The value of Sime’s work can be described on 2 levels. Specifically in relation to evacuation under emotional stress, while he did not produce an answer to the problem of combining environmental, engineering and psychological factors; the value of the work was that he recognised the possibility of such a combination, advocated the approach and, finally, produced a framework that described the relationships and acted as a roadmap for further research. In more general terms, his advocation of transdisciplinary, ‘borderline’ approaches marks an evolution of thought from the traditional form of study and research based purely on subject (cf “silo thinking” in multi-departmental, commercial organisations). In both cases, Sime did not claim to have metaphorically thrown open the door of the solution: nevertheless, to continue the metaphor, he can be said to have successfully placed the key in the lock and invited others to turn it.

Sime’s early death deprived the transdisciplinary approach to emergency evacuation of a significant supporter. However, researchers such as Proulx, Ozel and Horlick-Jones continue to pursue twin goals of:

a. A satisfactory union of scientific and sociological methods to describe human behaviour in the built environment in response to hazards and alarms; and,

b. A widespread acceptance of such a model by researchers in the field of human behaviour in fire situations on both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ sides of the fence.