Towards a unified affordance approach: searching for congruent meaning making in COVID-19 warning designs

This case study on COVID-19 warning designs in a Swedish context illustrates how unified affordance approach may contribute to an understanding of the meaning-making reminders, instructions, cues and prompts that communicate message “keep your distance.” The analysis combines semiotic ecological categories, taking both Gibson’s original theorizing affordances more recent affordance-informed research efforts into consideration. In so doing, aims bridge knowledge gap visual instructions as well comprehensive way delineate multimodal design strategies associated with designs. shows keep-your-distance-kind belong non-standardized emerging genre is marked by great variation ad-hoc solutions, several which combine physical blocking functions verbally based messages. also highlights tension between verbal recourses, one hand, signage placement choice materials, other hand. It concluded communication resources do not always appear convey same basic message, but incongruent ways weaken what might be considered intended main message.