User activity – product function association based design rules for universal products

Published Date
January 2012, Vol.33(1):85–110, doi:10.1016/j.destud.2011.06.002

Author 

• Shraddha Sangelkar
• Nicholas Cowen
• Daniel McAdams ^,

• Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University College Station, TX 77843, USA

Available online 22 July 2011. 

Universal design is a concept intended to promote the development of products and environments equally usable by all the users, benefits of which are well established. Earlier efforts to provide guidelines for universal design have not adequately supported industry requisites. This paper focuses on creating early stage applicable design guidelines for universal design which is based on modeling framework that builds on and extends general function based product design methods and formal human activity classification as developed by World Health Organization. This paper explores the applicability of data mining techniques, particularly, association rule learning, for developing guidelines for universal design. The results show promise in the application of data mining techniques to efficiently extract rules for improving universal design.

Highlights

► Employs actionfunction diagram to study the existing universal products. ► Extends the ICF, developed by W.H.O., for modeling user limitations. ► Applies the data mining technique called association rule learning. ► Creates early stage applicable guidelines for universal design.

Keywords

universal design

human factors

product design

product modeling

design activity

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• ∗ 
  Corresponding author: Daniel McAdams

For further details log on website :
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0142694X11000408