Adapting ADA Architectural Design Knowledge to Product Design: Groundwork for a Function Based Approach

摘要

Disability is seen as a result of an interaction between a person and that person'scontextual factors. Viewing disability in the context of the built environment, a betterdesign of this environment helps to reduce the disability faced by an individual. In spiteof significant research in Universal Design (UD), the existing methods provideinsufficient guidance for designers: designers demand more specific examples of, andmethods for, good universal design.Within the overarching goal of improving universal product design, the specificgoal of this research is to determine if the ADA guidelines for architectural design canbe adapted to product design. A methodology that foresees the accessibility issues whiledesigning a product would be constructive. The new technique should be built on thepre-existing principles and guidelines.A user activity and product function framework is proposed for this translationusing actionfunction diagrams. Specific goals include determining if the function-basedapproach is able to anticipate a functional change that improves product accessibility.Further, generate user activity and product function association rules that can be appliedto the universal design of products.Proposed research activities are to identify thirty existing universal products andcompare with its typical version to identify the function that introduces an accessibilityfeature. Next, categorize the observed changes in a product function systematically andextract trends from accessible architectural systems to generate rules for universal designof consumer products. For validation, the task is to select around fifteen consumerproduct pairs for validation of the generated rules to determine if the ADA guidelinescan be adapted for universal product design using the proposed framework.The results of this research show promise in using the International Classificationof Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) lexicon to model user limitation. Theactionfunction diagram provides a structured way to approach a problem in the earlystage of design. The rules generated in this research translate to products having similaruser-product interface.