In real life, the universal design of products and public service has become a crucial element in our society as frequent international communications significantly contribute to social and technological development, because the comprehensively universal design effectively improves the efficiency of cross-nation cooperation, multilanguage communication, and accessibility of information. Admittedly, fully universal design has encountered challenges as our society has become more diverse for numerous reasons. That is why we should analyze the successful universal design example throughout history, and present user cases to find out how to create a universal design.
In the ideology given by the University of Buffalo, University design requires six components which are equity, flexibility, simplicity, and other important components[1]. This concept has been used in numerous fields of academics and engineering including civil engineering, education engineering, and computer engineering. In this element, I will focus on the universal design of international road surface marking, historical posters, openAi’s Chatgpt design, and Chrome design.
Road surface marking between Canada and China has numerous similarities and connections among concepts and terminology. The similarities include dot line usage, arrow usage, color usage, and stopping sign designs. This phenomenon occurs internationally because of similar civil designs among countries and the car flow algorithm’s international normalization. These similarities benefit car owners because they easily get an international car passport and transform the passport into a local car driving license. Even though there are some differences among car marking designs due to local population density and different methods of civil engineering, car drivers are not required to study from the beginning but start with road sign testing to eliminate the ambiguity of road surface marking. I suggest it is a very great example to use similar symbol design to improve the equity and simplicity of the service so that international drivers can mobile easily.
Another universal design is to overcome the barrier of illiteracy rather than internationalism. In the early stage of the Soviet Union, the culture department used very simple posters to prevent illiterate workers from causing social chaos, industrial accident, and alcohol abuse violence. That includes some of the internationally popular posters like these:
I believe even if you do not know the Russian letters, you can still get the point of what the poster means. I also feel that is what is missing from the most advertisement. Most of the social advertisement design is not universal because they did not think about illiterate people and deaf people, as they put a lot of critical information in letters and voice channels without adding critical information on visuals and figures.
The final example that I want to point out is universal design in computer engineering. Scientists and engineers have developed an eye-tracking system to assist disabled people to use the computer for gaming [3]. This greatly improved the universality of computer usage. The video demonstrates the eye-tracking control systems on a PC to assist a player while the player is gaming. However, if you think out of the box about gaming, we may allow disable people to use eye-tracking control systems to work in the office like those physically profound people. Then it will greatly improve the equity for not only the universal design on computer engineering but also the whole of society and its development.
[1]https://www.buffalo.edu/access/help-and-support/topic3/universaldesignprinciples.html
[2]https://fineartamerica.com/featured/het-soviet-anti-alcohol-propaganda-1954-war-is-hell-store.html
Hi Jing! It was great to hear about the road surface marking, historical posters, and eye-tracking systems you shared. I found those examples really interesting! However, I couldn’t find the Chatgpt and Chrome designs you mentioned in your introduction. You also said that the University of Buffalo “requires six components which are equity, flexibility, simplicity, and other important components,” I wonder what those “other” components are.