Design Practice and ‘Designing for All’

Accepted for publicationIt is essential that all designers with responsibility for the human-machine interface have access to information on the anthropometry and capabilities of the whole population of people who may wish to interact with the design in question. Current databases used by designers typically present only very limited information concerning people who are older and/or disabled. Furthermore, tables of data are known to be largely ineffective and designers prefer to see visualisations of design data. In order to establish the current situation regarding design in relation to the needs of older and disabled people, existing products, procedures and systems were investigated. The objective was to identify current practice and the needs of designers whilst attempting to ‘design for all’. This paper will report on the findings from these interviews to date, which will ultimately lead to a requirements specification to aid design for the needs of older and disabled people

Addressing Constraints Creatively: How New Design Software Helps Solve the Dilemma of Originality and Feasibility

International audienceAre designers doomed to sacrifice creativity when integrating new product development processes? Although many studies highlight the need to produce original and innovative designs, maintainingcreativity in the design process continues to be difficult due to industrial constraints. Thus, creativity is restricted to phases in the "Fuzzy Front End" to avoid those constraints that might effectively kill it(Amabile, 1998, Reid and De Brentani, 2004). However, constraints are also acknowledged as a resource for creativity, ashas previously been shown with artists and engineers (Burkhardt and Lubart, 2010, Sternberg and Lubart, 1999, Le Masson et al., 2011, Goldenberg and Mazursky, 2000).Thus, we posethefollowing research question: In which cases can a constraint be a resource for creativity? To answer this question, we investigate different types of computer-aided design (CAD) software. Relying on an experimental method, we compare the performance of those types of software at the so-called ideation gap where design sketches are transformed into digital models. We show the following: 1) some CAD software enables designers to work under additional constraints and be more creative and toavoid the tradeoff between robustness and creativity,and 2) understanding this performance means appreciating that such software enables designers to play with the embedded constraints to revealassociated fixations and to design models that follow the constraint but overcome the fixation. Constraints and creativity are linked by two competing processes: constraints decrease the degree of freedom and, as a result, creative possibilities, but embedding constraints increases the awareness of fixationsandtherefore the capacity to design original models. Today, new CAD tools more effectively support the second process, which leads to ―acquired originality‖ in design

Sensory substitution information informs locomotor adjustments when walking through apertures

The study assessed the ability of the central nervous system (CNS) to use echoic information from sensory substitution devices (SSDs) to rotate the shoulders and safely pass through apertures of different width. Ten visually normal participants performed this task with full vision, or blindfolded using an SSD to obtain information regarding the width of an aperture created by two parallel panels. Two SSDs were tested. Participants passed through apertures of +0%, +18%, +35%, and +70% of measured body width. Kinematic indices recorded movement time, shoulder rotation, average walking velocity across the trial, peak walking velocities before crossing, after crossing and throughout a whole trial. Analyses showed participants used SSD information to regulate shoulder rotation, with greater rotation associated with narrower apertures. Rotations made using an SSD were greater compared to vision, movement times were longer, average walking velocity lower and peak velocities before crossing, after crossing and throughout the whole trial were smaller, suggesting greater caution. Collisions sometimes occurred using an SSD but not using vision, indicating that substituted information did not always result in accurate shoulder rotation judgements. No differences were found between the two SSDs. The data suggest that spatial information, provided by sensory substitution, allows the relative position of aperture panels to be internally represented, enabling the CNS to modify shoulder rotation according to aperture width. Increased buffer space indicated by greater rotations (up to approximately 35% for apertures of +18% of body width), suggests that spatial representations are not as accurate as offered by full vision