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Beyond Today’s Information Representation

Tsuyama National College of Technology

Universal Design. Have you heard of it? Do you know what it is? It is an idea under which we create things that all people can use easily and safely, regardless of the users' sex, age, or the condition of their body. It covers not only the things that help physically but also the things that make it easy to transmit information.

Around us, there are many information representations with Universal Design, such as what we can see in train stations, public restrooms and so on. But there are some problems in the field of information representation with Universal Design today. Not everyone can understand the Universal Design messages.

Today, we will discuss how information is represented in Universal Design, called UD, and how we can improve it.

We are from Tsuyama National College of Technology: Mai Otani, Eriko Yamaguchi, and Yukako Iida.

Please enjoy our presentation.

First, let's look at some simple examples around us.

Have you ever seen these symbols? Do you know what they mean?

These are the symbols for “the priority seat” in the train. From the left, each symbol means, a person with a child, a pregnant woman, an elderly person and an injured person.

People with some kind of handicap can sit preferentially on the seat with these symbols. These symbols are very simple and they express important information effectively. We can understand the meaning intuitively without explanation with words.

This direct way of representing information without using words is not only visual. Thanks to sound from traffic lights, people who are visually disabled can distinguish the color of the traffic lights and can cross the street safely. Have you noticed that in the case of an elevator the sound for “up” is different from that for “down”?

I didn't notice this until I made this study.

With these optical or auditory information representations, we can not only understand information quickly but also transmit the information to disabled people effectively.

For diffusing Universal Design, do you know the government's action plan?

These are the pamphlets about basic Universal Design circulated by Okayama prefectural government.

There are several different pamphlets, so people of all ages, from elementary school children to elderly people, can understand what Universal Design is.

As you can see the Okayama prefectural government is aiming to exploit Universal Design in order to facilitate communication with all citizens, regardless of disability, nationality, or other conditions. The goal is to have 28,000 UD supporters, 18 stations with UD facilities, and 2000 buildings with UD by 2011. This is very important as Japan becomes more multicultural and inclusive.

Now we will talk about problems in communicating information.

The information received may be limited by physical conditions or disability. For example, some visual information cannot be received depending on the condition of a person's vision. Look at this sign. When you see this sign, what would you do?

Of course I would not approach the place where this sign is.

But what about color-blind people? Some of them may recognize the sign like this.

They cannot see it, and they cannot understand the message. Because of this there might be an accident.

In this way, receivers with a certain disability cannot understand what a sign means. However, by adding some modifications, we can realize universal information representation.

Have you understood what Universal Design is? Now we can turn to solving problems with universal design.

Let's look at one interesting example. Eriko, you know “NINTENDO DS”, don't you?

Of course, it is a very popular game console series produced by Nintendo.

That's right. But actually, they had a problem. One day, Nintendo received a complaint about “NINTENDO DS Lite”, which was the latest version at the time. It was from a color-blind user. It was about the DS battery lamp, which changes from green to red when the battery is weakening.

This picture shows the game console of the version mentioned here. As you see, the battery lamp is green and red.

Users in general can recognize the remaining amount of the battery life, but color-blind users cannot. This is because most of them cannot tell green from red.

After receiving the complaint, the company has improved the game console by producing a new-version, “DS i” with blue and red light.

Most color-blind people can distinguish blue and red, so they can understand the information easily.

As this example shows, small modifications can make something easy to use for many more people. But, there might be more devices we have not noticed yet. We should not be satisfied with today's information representation and keep looking for more and better ways to represent information.

We tend to think of things only from our own point of view. Around us, there are people who cannot see what we see, people who cannot hear what we hear, or people who cannot understand the language we use. Various barriers come to light when we see things from the viewpoint of other people. Therefore, we need to educate people and spread the idea of “Universal Design”.

However, the concept of “Universal Design” has much to do with specialized fields such as information science and linguistics.

How can we create better universal visual symbols? How can we encode information more compactly, making use of images and words together? How can we identify all the different kinds of handicaps people have? There is a lot of information we want to communicate, but it is necessary to find the essential and important part of them and to make it understandable.

In conclusion, to all of you future engineers, what we want to say is “Please consider from the viewpoint of other people.” Learn about the principles of Universal Design, and use them in your engineering.

So, this way, we will make better products, and be able to live in a society that includes everybody.

To learn Universal Design, first look for the problems around you. And talk about them with other people. Then you may empathize with them.

The matters you've felt might be the matters that others have felt. Therefore, to find the social problems is the first step to understanding the viewpoint of other people.

To create the society that blends with the user's point of view. That is a Universal World.