History and Past Activities
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History and Past Activities |
ESA Conference: Ageing Societies, New Sociology
September 23-26, 2003 in Murcia, Spain
Two streams of sessions of the
Research Network 18: Sociology of Science and Technology (SSTNET)
Convenors:
Raymund Werle: Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, Köln, Germany (werle@mpi-fg-koeln.mpg.de)
Marja Häyrinen Alestalo: Dept. of Sociology, University of Helsinki, Finland (marja.alestalo@helsinki.fi)
Luísa Oliveira: DINÂMIA/ISCTE, Lisboa, Portugal (luisa.oliveira@iscte.pt)
Maarten Mentzel: 38 Johan de Wittstraat, 2334 AR Leiden, The Netherlands (m.a.mentzel@planet.nl)
Second Stream: New Technologies in Ageing Societies
Friday Sept. 26
09.00 - 11.00 session 7 (Campus de La Merced)
Chair Luísa Oliveira
7.6. Author(s): Kihara, Hidetoshi
Institution: Faculty of Political Science and Economics, Kokushikan University
Professional Category: Professor
City: Tokyo
Country: Japan
E-mail: kihara@kokushikan.ac.jp
UNIVERSAL DESIGN AS SOCIAL CRITICISM IN AGEING SOCIETIES
Elder people certainly often lack the skills to use new technologies. In this sense, they can be regarded as a kind of disabled persons. Many new technologies, on the other hand, also often lack the capabilities for these persons' use. They can be, in the sense, thought of as partial and disabled technologies.
"Technology literacy", improving the skills of elder and disabled people, is a part of solution to such mismatches of people's skills and technologies' capabilities. "Universal design", a kind of improvement of technologies' capabilities, is another part of solution. But, since there are limits to the improvement of people's skills and also the required skills for people to use some technologies adequately depend solely on the capabilities of the technologies, we should take it for our primary issue the improvement of technologies' capabilities.
This paper will examine the importance of universal design in improving the capabilities of new technologies in aging societies, especially when we hope for the societies to be liberal.
Design activities are nothing but technology criticism in that they point out alternative possibilities of how to produce and dispose artifacts. And also, pointing out such possibilities is giving alternative possibilities of power relations embodied in the artifacts, that is a sort of social criticism. Technology criticism here leads to social criticism. In the case of universal design, it leads to liberalism as social criticism. The core of universal design concept is that we should give opportunity sets equally to each social member and thereby secure substance of his self-decision making. This is nothing but the idea of liberalism that aims at freedom in equal relationship. Moreover, I will show the universal design should be applied to the design of social relations beyond that of artifacts in ageing societies.
Sociology of Science and Technology NETwork - last update: April 2006