Universal product design involving elderly users: a participatory design model

Abstract

Recent studies have shown that people prefer to age in their familiar environments, thus guiding designers to provide a safe and functionally appropriate environment for ageing people, regardless of their physical conditions or limitations. Therefore, a participatory design model is proposed where human beings can improve their quality of life by promoting independence, as well as safety, useability and attractiveness of the residence. Brainstorming, scenario building, unstructured interviews, sketching and videotaping are used as techniques in the participatory design sessions. Quality deployment matrices are employed to find the relationships between the elderly user's requirements and design specifications. A case study was devised to apply and test the conceptual model phase of the proposed model.

Product interface design: A participatory approach based on virtual reality

“…Recent research (Muller and Kuhn, 1993;Schuler and Namioka, 1993;Reich et al, 1996;Finn and Blomberg, 1998;Demirbileka and Demirkan, 2004) has described the Participatory Design (PD) as an emerging approach that considers users as the core of design processes and aims to guarantee usability, simplicity and intelligibility of the product. The peculiarity of such a method is due to the direct involvement of end users during all phases of the product development; the user actively takes part in the whole project procedure, and his contribution has a fundamental significance in the product characterisation because he/she drives the assessment of any design variables.…”

The value of computer-based product representations in co-designing with older users

“…Interestingly, the findings from this research indicate that although the unfinished representations were confusing in terms of evaluating these gardening products, they may have a more useful role in eliciting suggestions for improvements. As stated by Demirbilek and Demirkan (2004), the 'perfect' nature of finished models can inhibit users from thinking that they can change a design.…”

Implementation of ergonomic aspects throughout the engineering design process: Human-Artefact-Context analysis

“…The USAP model of participatory design (Usability, Safety, Attractiveness, Participatory), can be applied to the development of products based on user-centric design [42]. Marshall uses the tool "personas" and/or user data sets to obtain end user proper information [43].…”

“…9 Design process-depth of methodology system that identifies human characteristics (capabilities and limitations) in order to generate design principles, evaluated at the very end of the process; applying changes only of future designs [3,42].…”