| Sumario: | Issue Seeking for design methods for products, services, and environments in everyday life to increase accessibility (the extent to which products etc. can be used by those with special needs) for older people who have weakened sensory, physical, cognitive abilities with aging, and consideration on how to incorporate ergonomic knowledge and data on aging in developing design methods. Content Due to the decrease in human sensory, physical, and cognitive abilities with age, older people have difficulties using products, services, and environments in everyday life. Accessible design is a method 'to compensate' (as one of the concepts of Gerontechnology) these human ability decreases by a design strategy of products, services, and environments which meet to the weakened human abilities and consequently to include those people in the range of users of the products etc. This concept can be differentiated from so-called assistive technology, in which human abilities are directly dealt with by technological enhancement of the ability itself - such as hearing aids for increasing hearing ability. Accessible design, on the contrary, tries to design products not to extent human abilities, but to accommodate products to the users without any additional tools. In this symposium, the principle of accessible design will be introduced and discussed further. The discussion is to be carried out by presenting examples of the basic design methods in vision (color, contrast, font size etc.), hearing (sound pressure, frequency, etc.), tactile (tactile symbol size, vibration, etc.) and some cognitive (memory) aspects as well. Because all these design methods should be based on human data, preferably taken for a large number of samples, discussion will also be focused on how the human abilities change with age, how those changes are distributed among older people, and how the best fit of the design is obtained. As concepts and methods of accessible design are being disseminated by standardizing bodies, national or international, such as Japan Industrial standards (JIS), Korean Standards (KS), ISO standards, the discussion will be directed towards the role of standardization in implementing accessible design into commercial and industrial applications Structure There will be 4 oral presentations, each on concept (Sagawa), sensory characteristics (Kurakata), Tactile (Lee), and Vision (Itoh), respectively, followed by a general discussion on introducing accessible design into Gerontechnology. Conclusion Raising awareness of accessible design and establishing a way for useful implementation of the concept in Gerontechnology
|
|---|