Disability 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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/ETD-TAMU-2010-08-8483 |
| Date | 2010 August 1900 |
| Creators | Sangelkar, Shraddha Chandrakant |
| Contributors | McAdams, Daniel A. |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
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