User activity-product function association based design rules for universal products

Universal design is a concept intended to promote the development of products and environments equally usable by all the users, benefits of which are well established. Earlier efforts to provide guidelines for universal design have not adequately supported industry requisites. This paper focuses on creating early stage applicable design guidelines for universal design which is based on modeling framework that builds on and extends general function based product design methods and formal human activity classification as developed by World Health Organization. This paper explores the applicability of data mining techniques, particularly, association rule learning, for developing guidelines for universal design. The results show promise in the application of data mining techniques to efficiently extract rules for improving universal design.