Abstract
Universal Design (UD) is the design of products and environments that can be used by all people in the widest possible way without the need for adaptation and custom design. It involves a wide range of design disciplines, including environments, products, and communication design. A working group of developers (architects, product designers and environmental design researchers) guided the design process without evaluating existing designs and identified seven UD principles to be used to educate designers and consumers about the properties of more useful products and environments. These principles are “Equitable Use”, “Flexibility in Use”, “Simple and Intuitive Use”, “Perceptible Information”, “Tolerance for Error”, “Low Physical Effort”, and “Size and Space for Approach and Use”. Prioritizing or weighting these principles can be handled as a Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) problem. For this reason, in this paper we study the prioritizing of these principles using two of MCDM techniques with fuzzy numbers, namely AHP and ANP, and the results of both algorithms are compared. The main contribution of this paper is to prioritize UD principles using numerical methods with experts’ view. This work, which includes grading the principle 7 of Universal Design in itself, will be guiding for designers. To the authors’ knowledge, this will be the first interdisciplinary study which uses these two techniques for evaluating UD principles for developers.