It is the assumption that kills you

This contribution reflects on the development of safety science in transport, infrastructure and logistics over a period of 40 years at Dutch universities, professional safety institutes and international networks. The contribution heavily relies on the work of the successive ESReDA Working Groups on safety investigation, the transport safety domain as deployed at Lund University in Sweden, the Delft University of Technology and the University of Applied Sciences in Amsterdam. Resulting in a series of graduate student projects, PhD studies and the author’s participation in the international aviation investigation community. This contribution identifies the cornerstones for a generative design perspective, challenging a paradigm shift in safety thinking. Four new tools are introduced, materializing this challenge. Based on initial developments in aviation, maritime and agriculture, these notions are extrapolated to wind farming applications in particular in view of the EU Directive (EU) 2022/2557 on the resilience of critical entities (EU 2024).