Providing Strategic User Information to Designers

Joy Goodman, Pat Langdon, John Clarkson
Engineering Design Centre, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge CB2 1PZ
{jag76, pml24@cam.ac.uk, pjc10@eng.cam.ac.uk}

An aim of the i~design project is to examine ways making designs accessible to the wider population including the impaired and elderly. One way to do this is to gain a better understanding of how designers currently work and in what contexts. We present results from an initial literature survey and some interactions with the design community, looking at methods they use to inform and guide design and when, how and why designers obtain and apply information about target users. We discuss some of the implications of the results for the development of provision of usable user information to designers engaged in inclusive design.

Download paper (Word document)

Back to list of papers