Kentaro Toda

Inclusive design workshop by regional cooperation between an NPO and a university

This is a case of running inclusive design workshops. Communication in an inclusive design workshop is not intercultural collaboration itself. However, as designers, engineers, and users who have individual needs, such as aged and disabled people, gather in the workshop, participants may become aware of differences in individual creation of meanings by communicating with other participants. Because as individuals our imaginative power is sometimes quite insufficient, it is not possible to sufficiently analyze such individual needs without communicating directly. In the inclusive design workshop, participants cooperate with each other during the design process, revealing differences in individual creation of meanings. In this paper, we describe some activities of social-academic cooperation, specifically cases of workshops that were run by an nonprofit organization (NPO) and a laboratory at Kyoto University. The former supports aged and disabled peoples participation in society and the latter researches communication by the system theory.

Decentralized Control of Multi-agent Systems Based on Modal Logics and Extended Higher Order Petri Nets

We introduce the notions of decentralized system structure of multi-agent systems, their behavioral and structural correctness, and centralized and decentralized control for attaining correct behavior, and also that of decentralized controllability which are then examined based on modal logical analysis of system behavior and Petri net representation of system structures.

Analysis of awareness while touching the tactile figures using near-infrared spectroscopy

In this paper, we propose a method to measuring how the blind to touch the tactile images using Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (NIRS). The tactile image is one of powerful tool to give any visual information for the blind. On the other hand, it is difficult to estimate the process that the blind has understood the tactile images because the only trajectories of the hand are too vague to identify when the blind know the target image. Some experimental results insist that the brain is strongly activated at beginning of a task rather than the process of the task. Then, NIRS is confirmed to be useful to analyze process of understanding tactile figures by touching.

Expanding awareness by inclusive communication design

In this paper, we report the case of an Inclusive Design workshop. Inclusive Design is a design method that includes elderly and disabled people not only in interviews, but also in the upstream design process such as basic design and survey analysis. In the workshop, participants designed scientific educational materials that visually impaired and sighted people can use together. To work together regardless of visual disability, participants used the image-processing system and the stereo copying machine to make images tactile. We think that collaborative work with elderly and disabled people in Inclusive Design can teach participants different perspectives and help to correct their biased view of each other. In fact, participants of the workshop noticed several facts that they were not aware of before. That is, the Inclusive Design workshop can improve social awareness.

Symbiotic artifact design by bioinformatic and multimodal frameworks

Various novel notions such as model design and autoprescriptive sets are introduced to extend our conceptualization of life systems as multibody symbiotic architectural modules. Also, a new paradigm of culatural anthropology called a “multimodal framework” (MMF), introduced by G. Samuel, is incorporated in our architecture. Modal design is used to design complex architectures, and autopresciptive sets can be utilized to progress the modal design processes.