AUNT-SUE

The toolkit can be used from city-regions down to the micro-level of streets, helping us to understand vehicles and facilities such as bus stops, signage and ticket machines. Central to its approach is the integration of policy, design and operations throughout the whole journey environment.

In its entirity, the project aim has been to develop and test sustainable policies and practices that will help deliver effective, socially inclusive design and delivery of transport and the associated public realm.

As the project was undertaken as part of a partnership, different bodies helped to develop different aspects of the toolkit. One of the main contributions from the Design Ergonomics group was the development of HADRIAN. HADRIAN (Human Anthropometric Data Requirements Investigation and Analysis) is a computer-aided design (CAD) inclusive design tool that includes detailed information on the size, shape, abilities and preferences of 102 people.

Each of these people is presented as an individual dataset. Their physical, cognitive and emotional data related to ‘activities of daily living’, such as shopping, cooking and making a journey are combined with a simple task analysis framework. Through the use of this framework practitioners can utilise the individuals in the database as virtual participants in a user group to assess the accessibility of interactions with designs.

This procedure deals with the multivariate nature of interactions by integrating the relevant physical, cognitive and emotional issues; those people who cannot achieve a critical task element, and are effectively ‘designed out’, are brought to the attention of the designer - this includes a virtual simulation of the problem(s) encountered by each person.