IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/ssrchp/978-1-84800-113-8_22.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Quality in Design: User-oriented Design of Public Toilets for Visually Impaired People

In: Recent Advances in Reliability and Quality in Design

Author

Listed:
  • Kin Wai Michael Siu

    (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University)

Abstract

According to United Nations statistics, about 1/30th of the world's population is visually impaired with different types, levels, and degrees of visual impairment. It is not difficult to realize that visually impaired people (VIP) face different kinds of difficulties and limitations in their daily lives, in particular when they need to interact with public environments and facilities with which they may not be familiar.In recent years, policymakers and researchers in different disciplines such as sociology, architecture, design, and engineering, have conducted more discussions and made increasing efforts to improve this situation. Among the various projects with different perspectives, directions, objectives, and targeted beneficiaries, the key approach is generally to apply technologies to provide convenience, or overcome existing “barriers” to use, for VIP. However, as many of the studies in Europe and America have shown, it remains clear that the situation is still unsatisfactory that complaints by VIP have frequently heard. Mass media also frequently report on accidents or unsatisfactory and unfair environments for VIP. This is not due to the "almighty" nature of the technologies or inventions, but to the fact that these technologies cannot fit the wants and needs of VIP (i.e., actual users) and functions as they were originally planned and intended.

Suggested Citation

  • Kin Wai Michael Siu, 2008. "Quality in Design: User-oriented Design of Public Toilets for Visually Impaired People," Springer Series in Reliability Engineering, in: Hoang Pham (ed.), Recent Advances in Reliability and Quality in Design, chapter 22, pages 441-464, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:ssrchp:978-1-84800-113-8_22
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-84800-113-8_22
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:ssrchp:978-1-84800-113-8_22. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.