Study and design of Gensai products: Reducing the amount of damage after natural disasters- The case study of creative ideas of Iranian and Japanese students

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Rozita Farzam and Marzieh Allahdadi

University of Tehran, Iran
University of Alzahra, Iran

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Abstract

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Natural disasters, which are a part of human life process has increased in its number and diversity every day and is raised as a major challenge to achieve sustainable development of human societies. Iran is considered as one of ten accident-prone countries in the world due to its geographical and geological location. So for years, the strategies such as crisis management, education, architectural design and others have been considered to reduce the impact of natural disasters on the country. Hence, the need for investigating the product design is important from the stage of risk identification to emergency response and natural disasters recovery. The aim of this study was to investigate strategies to design products focused on minimizing the damage rate caused by natural disasters as well as to assess the ideas against these terrible disasters. Since Japan is the founder of this topic and has designed multiple products in coping with natural disasters, therefore, the workshops held in this regard in Japan and a similar one in Iran holding by the authors, have been selected as the case study. This study which was based on cross-sectional approach evaluated in order to fulfill the goals through the study of documents, books, essays and articles as well as holding workshops and analyzing the projects; and ultimately, some suggestions are presented by conducting the hierarchical analysis. Our results show that designing the products by Gensai approach plays a significant role in reducing the damages of natural disasters.

Biography

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Rozita Farzam is working as Assistant Professor from October 2014 to till date and an Academic & Faculty Member at Industrial Design Department, University of Tehran, College of Fine Arts. Tehran, Iran. She completed her Master’s and PhD from the Department of Environment Design at Kobe Design University, Kobe, Japan. In September 2013, she published her doctoral thesis; Titled “A Study on Day Lighting Systems for Iranian Schools- Design Process of Integrated Lighting Systems for Existing Classrooms”, Kobe Design University, Kobe, Japan. She is associates between University of tehran with Universities of Japan.

Email: rozfarzam@yahoo.com