An Approach to Universal Design from System Science

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To address the situation where recent methodologies of Universal Design (UD) become estranged from "the principles of UD" originated with R.Mace, we examined guidelines for UD by employing notions of systems science. The guidelines regard re-designs by alterations of physical quantities as a last resort. The guidelines aim to focus designers' intentions to qualitative gropes. The axis of our research is our assumption of a sufficient condition on UD : "instead of enforcing an unique optimized operation-sequence, they are open to various interpretations" and "generous constraints afford possible operations" and "interactions between a operation and the following alterations of affordance can be interpreted as a conversation." We broke this axis down into three sub-axes that are interdependent with each other.The first sub-axis was to elucidate the concepts : "generous constraint" and "interaction as conversation." For this purpose, we proposed models of "generous constraint" by modal lo … More gics and by the arbitrariness of information channels in terms of Qualitative Information Theory. We also proposed a framework of a design support system based on "interaction as conversation" defined from the viewpoint of alethic, deontic and temporal modalities, and teleological-causal necessities.The second sub-axis was bridging from qualitative to quantitative design processes. Adopting genetic algorithms, we developed a constraint solver that treats qualitative statements as constraints then decides quantitative parameters.The third sub-axis was actual proofs. The results of first and second axes were applied to several designs. For example, we participated in the project of designing rest rooms in the ward of a rehabilitation center in Osaka pref., that of designing entrance gates of unattended bicycle parking lots with a venture company in Kyoto city, and that of web pages.Furthermore, for comparing with UD, we invited Ms. Jullia Cassim, the leading expert of Inclusive Design, and carried out a workshop. Less