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area; disabled individuals from the
Tanpopo no Ye network and one
employee of a small company.
Framework
The workshop followed the pattern
devised for the Holon workshop
with the crucial difference being the
involvement of disabled users. Each
of the four teams spent half a day
shadowing their assigned subject
– a visually impaired housewife, two
young male wheelchair users and
a visually impaired couple in their
50s. The teams worked late into
the night to develop their design
ideas for presentation on the final
day to faculty staff and members of
the public.
Results
The four projects were as varied as
those by their Israeli counterparts.
One team proposed a new easyto-open
packaging design for
vacuum-sealed ‘natto’ – the
fermented soya beans that are
a cheap and popular item of the
Japanese diet. A second group
devised a new system for making
individual cups of filtered coffee
while the third looked at the
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problems visually impaired people
experience in applying toothpaste.
‘Tooth Candy’ was their answer
– solidified toothpaste that could
be popped in the mouth and was
as ideal for people on the move as
the visually impaired person who
had inspired it.
The winning team worked with
a young wheelchair user who was
an avid visitor to games centres and
a fan of puri-kura (print club), which
he exchanged as visual autograph
equivalents with his friends. These
arcade booths deliver sticker sheets
of 16 miniature photographs of the
subject posed against a variety of
computer-graphics backgrounds.
It is a popular sub-culture among
young people in Japan.
The team devised a way
in which this system could be
translated into sound so that
instead of images, friends could
exchange sounds using existing
mobile phone technology. The
judging panel felt that this was a
unique way of promoting social
inclusion and having fun.