Universal Design and Academic Opportunities

The Grangegorman Project represents a unique chance. If Universal Design Principles are employed throughout its development,it presents rare opportunities to record and disseminate the experience. In Partnership with the various agencies here today, we can grow a rich harvest of first class research in the domain of Universal Design. From this we can also establish ourselves as leaders in the provision of training to others in the application of Universal Design across many disciplines.

In our School of Computing, our focus is clearly on ICT Our Programs have considered Inclusion, Assistive Technology and latterly Universal Design going back to the early 1990’s. We have run final year projects, developed modules, integrated inclusion into our syllabi and established a MSc in Computing ( Assistive Technology). Yesterday we started our CPD in Accessible Web Design.

This CPD in Accessible Web Design has its inspiration in the CEN Community Workshop Agreement in Universal Design lead by Donal Rice of the CEUD. It is going to press today. This document specifies courses in Universal Design that are suitable for training of professionals in ICT industry. It specifies 10 training units.

The training units are: 6.1 Universal Design and Target User Groups 6.2 User Interfaces 6.3 Universal Design and System Architectures 6.4 Web Applications 6.5 Consumer Electronics, Games 6.6 User-Centred Design 6.7 Evaluation 6.8 Assistive Technology. 6.9 Business Cases 6.10 Ethics, Legislation, Privacy

The need to train ICT professionals in this area is identified by the EU as a key driver in expanding markets for e-commerce These universal design lessons apply to the ICT infrastructure of the New DIT, from ensuring its websites are accessible, to its delivery of course materials to innovative pervasive computing which can underpin everything from signage to campus management. The School of Computing should look to expand its CPD brief to more of these training units, to play a role in the transfer of UD knowledge to the campus project and the wider IT community.

Some Thoughts on research potential of Universal Design using our School as an example. Universal Design is great vehicle for cross discipline research. Models which address Inclusion and Access are usually based on the triple of Person, Environment and Occupation or Activity.

Environment Occupation Person

A number of years ago the school developed a serious game to teach hygiene protocol for professional chefs. The game is called SERIOUS GORDON

This game certainly considers the Triple of PERSON ENVIRONMENT and OCCUPATION A key environmental representation used is the IDEA of SMART objects where the persons required interaction with the object is stored within the Object Representation. How can this idea be extended to consider Access.

The recent work of the CEUD considers Clarksons Notion of design exclusion where the capability demands of objects are measured against the Anthropometric and capability attributes of the Person It is my opinion that we could have a strong fusion of Data Analytics ( New MSc) informing product data, anthropometric data, capability demands and so on giving new definition to person and the objects which make up the physical environment.

Our Games Developers ( New MSc) could look at extending models of the environment and personal interactions to develop serious games which investigate the access and activity performance of a wide range of People in different environmental contexts and look how universally designed features improve this access.

A virtual tour of the New DIT campus has already been considered. This could be the landscape of this new generation of serious games informed by Universal Design and real data analytics across the various data sets from Anthropometric data to Design Exclusion.

In Summary : Universal Design offers new opportunities for Teaching and Learning and also for exciting Research Collaborations I have mentioned some here. What other opportunities are out there?