Research On Inclusive Product Design Based On User Motion Capability

The variation in demographic structure and technologies causes various problems in product design.As a result,some products are unable to adjust to diversified user capabilities,leading to different levels of obstacles and barriers or even “excluding” the product users.Fortunately,inclusive design centers on users and guarantees opportunities of fair usage by mitigating the conflict between product demand and user capability.Motion capability falls into one of the many categories of user capability.As an integral part of the studies on inclusive design,motion capability is the groundwork of users' daily life and under the influence of users' physiological function and health condition.Most studies,however,concentrate on environment and architecture design instead of product design,and haven't given form to systemic design strategies or procedures.Therefore,this study priorities users' motion capability to probe into the procedures of designing products and measures of assessing product inclusiveness.First,starting from theoretical research,this study described the theoretical framework and development process of inclusive design,summarized the theoretical application value,features and advantages of inclusive design via comparing similar theories,and,in the end,came to a conclusion on the assessment measures of product inclusiveness from two perspectives.Second,this study proposed measures to assess product inclusiveness from the angle of users' motion capability,and summed up five design principles – “people-oriented;fair usage;respect for differences;flexible choices;and friendly experience” based on the previous theoretical research.After that,this study put forward four design strategies – “tactfully apply technologies;simplify procedures;improve product motions;deliberate modeling” for product use,and established design procedures and approaches.Third,this study took electric irons for domestic use as an example and distilled the types of demand on users' motion capability from analyzing user behavior.With that as the foundation,this study then constructed an assessment mechanism on product inclusiveness and invited users to participate in testing and rating.At the same time,this study conducted user experiments where typical user role models were set up to evaluate the inclusiveness of electric irons towards users' motion capability in an all-round way.Finally,grounded on the design principles,strategies and procedures proposed,this study carried out innovations in physical models for objective assessment,and compared the models with the old ones before innovation to verify whether the design procedures are effective and reasonable.In conclusion,this study makes some contributions to improving the theoretical system of inclusive design,and presents valid design approaches for better product inclusiveness from the perspective of users' motion capability.In so doing,this study digs deeper in the research of inclusive design in a more extensive way and has completed an innovative design of electric irons,providing a little bit reference for future professionals to carry out product design.