Browsing by Subject "Universal Design"
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Item Adapting ADA Architectural Design Knowledge to Product Design: Groundwork for a Function Based Approach(2011-10-21) Sangelkar, Shraddha ChandrakantDisability is seen as a result of an interaction between a person and that person's contextual factors. Viewing disability in the context of the built environment, a better design of this environment helps to reduce the disability faced by an individual. In spite of significant research in Universal Design (UD), the existing methods provide insufficient guidance for designers: designers demand more specific examples of, and methods for, good universal design. Within the overarching goal of improving universal product design, the specific goal of this research is to determine if the ADA guidelines for architectural design can be adapted to product design. A methodology that foresees the accessibility issues while designing a product would be constructive. The new technique should be built on the pre-existing principles and guidelines. A user activity and product function framework is proposed for this translation using actionfunction diagrams. Specific goals include determining if the function-based approach is able to anticipate a functional change that improves product accessibility. Further, generate user activity and product function association rules that can be applied to the universal design of products. Proposed research activities are to identify thirty existing universal products and compare with its typical version to identify the function that introduces an accessibility feature. Next, categorize the observed changes in a product function systematically and extract trends from accessible architectural systems to generate rules for universal design of consumer products. For validation, the task is to select around fifteen consumer product pairs for validation of the generated rules to determine if the ADA guidelines can be adapted for universal product design using the proposed framework. The results of this research show promise in using the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) lexicon to model user limitation. The actionfunction diagram provides a structured way to approach a problem in the early stage of design. The rules generated in this research translate to products having similar user-product interface.Item Automated Inclusive Design Heuristics Generation with Graph Mining(2013-08-01) Sangelkar, Shraddha ChandrakantInclusive design is a concept intended to promote the development of products and environments equally usable by all users, irrespective of their age or ability. This research focuses on developing a method to derive heuristics for inclusive design. The research applies the actionfunction diagram to model the interaction between a user and a product, design difference classification to compare a typical product with its inclusive counterpart, graph theory to mathematically represent the comparison relations, and graph data mining to extract the design heuristics. The goal of this research is to formalize and automate the inclusive-design heuristics generation process. The rule generation allows statistical mining of the design guidelines from existing inclusive products. Formalization results show that, the rate of rule generation decreases as more products are added to the dataset. The automated method is particularly helpful in the developmental stages of graph mining applications for product design. The graph mining technique has capability for graph grammar induction, which is extended here to automate the generation of engineering grammars. In general, graph mining can be applied to extract design heuristics from any discrete and relational design data that can be represented as graphs. Concept generation studies are conducted to validate the heuristics derived in this research for inclusive product design. In addition, an inclusivity rating is created and verified to evaluate the inclusiveness of the conceptual ideas. Finally, appreciation and awareness about inclusive design is important in an engineering design course, hence, a module is compiled to teach inclusive design methods in a capstone design course. The results of the exploratory study and validation show that there is problem dependency in the application of the representation scheme. It cannot be stated with certainty at this point if the representation scheme is helpful for designing consumer products, where only the activities related to the upper body are involved. However, self-reported feedback indicates that the teaching module is effective in increasing the awareness and confidence about inclusive design.