Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Universal design is an approach to design daily used products that are usable by all people to the greatest possible extent. However, successful application of universal design requires an understanding of human performance. Ergonomic considerations are a part of "universal design" and should be taken into account by manufacturing engineers in product development. Integration of ergonomic considerations into the manufacturing processes becomes a major marketing strategy. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is intended to explore the relationship between body dimensions and the “height” of consumer products. A “user/product/effect” model is proposed to study how to design “height” into products and the results are discussed.

The data formats of specialist disciplines are often difficult for those from other disciplines to access, not least lay audiences, inhibiting truly participative and inclusive processes. The authors discuss the achievements and value of visualizing biomechanical data on functional demand obtained during daily activities from older adults in the 60+, 70+ and 80+ age groups which has shown the potential to provide physiotherapists, occupational therapists, designers, bioengineers, and human factors specialists much improved access to the data. Older adults have their own valuable insights and these are vital to include in developing a fuller understanding of issues that affect their quality of life. The format of visualization has the potential to be understood by this ’lay’ audience. The paper discusses the design of, and pilots towards a full-scale study to try to fully engage stakeholder disciplines and older people as truly collaborative partners, together with conclusions to date.

Search string analysis has implications for developing better designs of Web interfaces and search engines. It is expected that millions of new users from Africa will enter the Internet arena in the not so distant future. Most of these users will be from countries with a low socio-economic standing. In order to determine the effect of socio-economic standing on the search behaviour of grade ten learners, their search characteristics were analysed. This study found that there is a difference in the search behaviour between novice users with a low socio-economic standing and those with a high socio-economic standing. These differences, however, only lasted for the first few sessions, where after all users showed the same search behaviour.

In recent years, a growing number of projects seek to address the disparity in opportunities available to people in rural versus urban areas through When introducing such technologies, there are a number of recognised barriers to their use and acceptance specific to rural areas. We define an ’inclusive technology’ as a technology which overcomes the barriers in using technology that are inherent within a community in order to increase the available opportunities. We propose a conceptual model and a set of heuristic measurements for evaluating the ’inclusiveness’ of a technology with respect to a given community, and illustrate our model by applying it to an actual real-world project. With this model we hope to achieve a better understanding of the problem, and develop a systematic process and framework for designing and evaluating technologies designed to overcome these disparities.

“Universal Access” is often focused on modifying main-stream products to respond to the demands of older and disabled people – which implies an extremely wide range of user characteristics. “Accessible” system design can produce systems which may be “accessible” but are in no sense “usable”. Many system developers also seem to believe that a consideration of older and disabled people mean the abandonment of exciting and beautiful designs.In contrast, we recommend driving inclusive design from the margins not the centre, and that designers should consider a number of “extra-ordinary users” in depth as individual people, rather than as representatives of an age group and/or disability, and design for their desires, and tastes as well as their needs. This provides a reasonable design brief, and the consideration of extremes acts as an effective provocation within the design process. A number of case studies will illustrate the effectiveness of this approach. Ways in which communication with extreme users can be most effectively conducted are also described.

Several evaluations of team awareness systems showed, that interruptions and privacy violations during usage often lead to the rejection of the system by users. Most authors argue that this rejection is due to a fundamental dual trade-off between sending awareness information and privacy, and between receiving awareness information and disruption or resource consumption. While the assumption of a fundamental trade-off is widely accepted in state-of-the-art research, this paper disputes the predominant hypothesis. Instead, it is argued, that the trade-off is not of fundamental nature, but caused by neglecting elementary aspects in the design process. In order to verify this line of argument, a novel interface concept for mediating socio-emotional awareness information is presented. To verify the validity of the conceptual approach, several evaluations were conducted. The evaluations verified the approach of this paper and showed, that a cautious interface design can enhance user privacy in multi-user awareness systems and minimize disruptive effects on primary tasks, without reducing awareness mediation and usability.

The current development of the Internet and its growing use makes it necessary to satisfy the needs of all users including those with disabilities having accessibility problems. Therefore we developed a new validator software called XValid, which is a human controlled testing tool for specific needs in light of design for all. We used the well-known WebXACT and this newly developed XValid validator for testing governmental, commercial and e-learning web pages. We made a comparison between both testing results. Based on these results we want to open web-designer’s eyes to the typical errors.

The purpose of this paper is to clearly point out commonly agreed definitions of the terms Ergonomics, Usability, Accessibility and Safety, their relations to each other, overlaps and differences and their influence on the design of products and services.

Traditionally assistive technology or environmental intervention introduced to help with independence in the home has tended to look ‘medical’ or ‘institutional’, focussing on function rather than aesthetic considerations and overlooking the aspirations of the householder. This paper describes a recent social housing project where the interior design of two newly built houses in Bradford, UK, for Habinteg Housing Association, were used to demonstrate that it is possible to balance form and function when designing to enhance independence in the home. The Bradford project builds on previous research in this area by the author and refers to the paper ‘Home Improvement for Independent Living’ (Pearce 2003). The initial research was in turn inspired by the construction of the first Lifetime Homes in Hull in 1994 by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, in collaboration with Habinteg Housing Association.

Participative software systems are a new class of software systems whose development does not end at the deployment but requires continued user participation and contribution. They need to provide both solutions to users and a participation framework that entails technical and social challenges. Meta-design is a promising approach to guide the development of participative software systems. Drawing on lessons learned from a systematic analysis of Open Source Software projects, this paper described general issues that need to be addressed to enable and encourage continued user participation during the meta-design process.