The Toshiba Group strives to achieve universal design through its business carried out in a variety of sectors. The Toshiba Group's approach to universal design is to contribute to achieving a society that can enjoy more comfortable and safe lifestyles by understanding the diversity of our customers (users) and providing products that satisfy as many people as possible.
Philosophy
The Toshiba Group creates valuable products
for providing peace of mind and delight to each individual user.
The Toshiba Group contributes to achieving a society
where everyone can live comfortably and enjoy peace of mind regardless of age, gender and abilities.
Vision
Making the unusable usable, making the difficult easy.
Toshiba's Universal Design makes products more user-friendly and safer.
Our aim is to design attractive products that even more consumers will want to use, through innovation and constantly improving the ease of use and convenience of our products.
Guideline
In accordance with the five principles and fifteen subprinciples of the Toshiba Universal Design Guidelines, the Toshiba Group strives to incorporate universal design across a widerange of its products.
- ・Design that conveys the product's ease of use
- ・Simple and intuitive use
- ・Minimize physical effort
- ・Provide the same effectiveness for all users, regardless of the user or the user's environment or circumstances
- ・Pursue safety and reduce users’ psychological anxieties
Concept
The Toshiba Group emphasizes “expanding its user base” and “improving user-friendliness”as the two main concepts of Universal Design.
- Expanding its user base (increasing accessibility)
- ・Reduce the number of people that were not able to use our products in the past or that the felt our products were inconvenient, while increasing the overall number of people that are able to use our products.
- Improving user-friendliness (increasing usability)
- ・Work to improve product features and performance to raise the level of convenience for users, including safety.
UD Process
In design processes centered on humans,
developing products and services by combining feedback
from our customers with a wide range of knowledge and experience.
-
- Understand
- Product planners, engineers, and designers work together as one to study matters such as customer requirements
for products and how they use the products.
-
- Produce
- Studying product concepts and ideas using the results of such studies, and developing prototypes that lead to achieving these concepts and ideas.
-
- Confirm
- Evaluating prototypes to see whether they truly satisfy customer requirements. Revising proposed designs and developing new prototypes based on the results of such evaluations, if necessary.
-
- Studies
&
Research - Carrying out studies and research needed to implement universal design, and accumulating relevant data and technical knowledge.
- Studies
-
- Universal
Design
Advisor
System - Employees with disabilities, or non-Japanese employees, with a keen interest in Universal Design help develop products that reflect Universal Design concepts. Such participation takes on many forms, including interviews, surveys, and product evaluations.
Click here to read more
- Universal
Examples of the Universal Design Advisor System Put to Use
Those who were not accustomed to reading braille, including UD advisors as well as adventitiously blind and people with low vision, evaluated elevator buttons with raised characters that we developed for Keio Corporation.
In order to develop railroad station elevators that can be used easily by as many people as possible, we designed raised characters for elevator floor buttons that can be easily read not only by sight but also by touch.
Paper on Universal Design Advisor System“Universal Design (UD) Advisor System Creating a Means for Employees with Disabilities To Participate in the Evaluation of UD Products”
（ABSTRACT）
The Toshiba Group practices universal design (UD) that is based on Voice of Customer, or VOC, but to strengthen our VOC collecting activities, we started a “Universal Design Advisor System” in 2007. Under this system, Toshiba Group employees with disabilities help to develop and evaluate UD products, regardless of the department to which they belong. This system promotes UD evaluation internally and helps expand the range of activities of Toshiba Group personnel. The Toshiba Group will continue to improve the system and develop it so that
it contributes to the Group’s manufacturing.
「Universal Design (UD) Advisor System
Creating a Means for Employees with Disabilities To Participate in the Evaluation of UD Products」(PDF:416KB)