Applying TRIZ Principles to Construct Creative Universal Design

Abstract

Normal 0 0 1 197 1127 9 2 1384 11.1282 0 0 0 To promote daily-used products that could be easily used and accessed by all people or at least most of the people, Universal Design (UD), or Inclusive Design, initiatives have been studied and proposed by many researches over last few decades. However, a holistic and systematic approach that considers UD principles throughout its whole product developmental process is necessitated in order to ensure that UD initiatives are fully built into the product itself and versatile and innovative product concept development is also fully explored, resulting in truly benefiting the users. This research proposed a TRIZ-based innovative product design process that incorporates UD principles. This newly formed methodology started with describing the problem, encountered during the product design and development, in terms of UD principles. The problem statement was then formulated by a 3-step inventive problem solving procedure. Contradiction Matrix of TRIZ was employed to identify proper inventive principles that could serve as resolutions, leading to improved or new product concepts. Finally, a case study was conducted to demonstrate how this creative design process works. Study result shows that this method can help identify the core of the problem and locate the improved product concepts rapidly, resulting in generating more creative resolutions.