AN APPROACH TO ENHANCE PRODUCT UNIVERSALITY USING VAGUE NUMBERS DURING INITIAL DESIGN PHASE

Abstract

AbstractUniversal design facilitates all user, a convenient interaction with the environment, product and services without the need for any adaptation and specialized designs. Recent studies have shown that designers and manufacturers are focusing only on a limited group of users during product development. Current design process or methodology cannot cater to all set of users i.e. Fully Abled People (FAP), Specially Abled People (SAP), and Differently Abled People (DAP) due to complexity in need interpretation. Identification and extraction of needs of diverse user set is a complex problem. Generally, information gathered from the users is linguistic in nature and comprises of uncertainties and ambiguities, which hamper conversion of users’ requirements into product attributes to deliver universal solutions. The aim of this work is to eliminate these uncertainties and extract the actual needs of all users. This work proposes the integration of Universal Product Design model with generic design process to improve universal product design practice. Linguistic preferences of the users are captured and converted into vague numbers to identify the important product attributes and provides a systematic framework of need prioritization.