Abstract
Recently, a concept "universal design" to design products equally usable by diverse users has been becoming important. Although various methods and techniques for universal design have been reported, most pf them are not sufficiently general or systematic. The purpose of this study is to establish effective design methods for universal design based on systematic analysis and comprehension of universal design problem. In the previous papers, the authors prpposed a structure-control apprpach matrix to systematically generate ppssible design ideas to handle user diversity. After generating design ideas, we need to estimate their feasibility, compare them and optimize the candidate considering user diversity. In this paper, the authors indicate that interval arithmetic can be an effective tool to support consideration on user diversity, especially quantitative diversity, in universal design process. Some interval arithmetic calculation is implemented as software and applied to simple universal design problem as an example.
