Engineering Applicability of a Universal Design Performance Measure

Universal Design (UD) is defined as the creation of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialization. There is a growing need for such products. However, many products are not accessible to all potential customers, arguably due to a lack of experience, design tools, and engineering methods for creating universally designed products. Currently, there are no industry standard design tools or methods to assist engineers in the universal design of products. The Center for Universal Design (North Carolina State University; Raleigh, NC) has created the Universal Design Performance Measure for Products (UDPMP), based on the seven principles of universal design, which is intended to assist industrial designers. This paper reports on research to evaluate the applicability of the UDPMP for assisting engineers in the universal design of consumer products. An experiment was conducted in which a group of practicing engineers analyzed three standard kitchen products (can opener, salad spinner, and corkscrew) to identify metrics that should be improved to create a UD version of these standard products. Half of the engineers, the test group, completed this exercise using the UDPMP, while the other half, the control group, did not use the tool. The results of the experiment show that the UDPMP assisted the engineers in the test group for a limited subset of the universal design principles. In particular, the test group identified reduction in force for the user as an important metric for universally designed products. The metrics generated in the experiment were most commonly linked with principle six of the UDPMP tool, i.e., “low physical effort.” The identified metrics were then physically measured for the standard products as well as for paired award-winning UD products to determine if the metrics were indeed improved in the UD product. Additionally, a comparison of functional models of the products was performed to identify any functional differences between each pair of standard and UD products. Improvement in metrics associated with low physical effort was verified for the UD products over the standard products, and added functionality was identified in the UD products that address these metrics. The research indicates that engineers who were given the UDPMP did generate more metrics that were improved in the UD versions of the products than engineers without the tool. While the UDPMP does assist engineers in certain aspects of UD design, it is clearly not a comprehensive tool for engineers. There is a need to develop tools and methods to promote UD by engineer designers of consumer products.