Practice of Universal Design for a Trash Can
With the advances of the medical technology and health care, the number of the aged people in the world increases year by year. Although more and more countries move toward an aging society, many products were designed without consideration for the old. A trash can is an important daily necessity which was chosen as the objective product in the present study. It was experimentally explored for the possibilities of design improvements based on the universal design concept. The activities users interacted with a trash can include throwing trash, placing a new trash bag and collecting the filled bag. These activities often require the specific user posture of bending down. It may be difficult for the aged and the injured people, and may lead to physical injuries. Therefore, the objective of this study is to verify design parameters of a trash can capable of providing improved usability for the users, especially for the old. A prototype with two adjustable key design parameters (height and angle) of a trash can was made for the usability experiments. They were conducted on two subject groups in Taiwan. One group has 35 subjects aged between 18 and 30 and the other has 30 subjects aged over 65. Both groups were asked to perform and evaluate three trash-can-related experiments, including throwing the specified trash into the can, placing a new trash bag in the can, and picking up the filled bag from the can. There were two specified samples for the thrown trash, a light-weighted plastic slice and a heavy-weighted crumpled paper ball in order to measure the required experimental data and observe subjects motion postures. The experimental results can be summarized as follows. First, a trash can with a 75cm height and 30° a tilt angle is best evaluated by the subjects. Second, the design parameters with 75cm/0°lead to the smallest bending angle of subjects trunks. Nevertheless, the angles 0°and30°both lead to “mild forward bending, causing no damage to human body. Finally, 75cm/ 30°is the fittest to the elderly users and an angle more than45° makes a significantly negative impact on the usability of a trash can.
Universal design aging trash can
Hung-Cheng Tsai Hung-Jung Tsai Yuan-How Hsu Yen-Da Huang Fei-Kung Hung
Graduate Institute of Industrial Design, National Kaohsiung First University of Science and Technolo Department of Mechanical Engineering, WuFeng Institute of Technology Department of Applied Art and Design, Nanhua University Department of Information Management, WuFeng Institute of Technology
国际会议
17th World Congress on Ergonomics(第十七届国际人类工效学大会)
北京
英文
1-5
2009-08-09（万方平台首次上网日期，不代表论文的发表时间）