A Process Framework of Affordances in Design

Introduction One of the many goals of design research is to better understand the ways in which end users interact with the products of designing. This focus is not surprising—the ultimate measure of success for any design is the adoption by the user. The concept of affordance recently has been the focus of increased interest in the design research community because it captures well the relationship between human users and designed artifacts. It has been imported from cognitive science, where it was first introduced by the perceptual psychologist, James Gibson (1977, 1979): The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (Gibson 1979, p. 127; emphasis is the author's) Affordances in design are the action possibilities of a user when the user interacts with an artifact. They can be " directly " perceived, based on the structural features of the artifact. This understanding has the advantage that users do not need to be provided with explicit instructions about how to use the artifact. As a result, they can spend less cognitive effort and make fewer errors when interacting with the artifact. Affordances are dynamic in that they emerge from the interaction between the user and the artifact. Users interact differently with the same artifact at different times (Vyas et al. 2006), which gives rise to different interpretations of affordances by these users. On the other hand, affordances tend to be generalized so that they are described no longer as specific to any individual user, but to groups of users or all users. This is apparent in the frequent use of word constructions ending with "-ability " when describing affordances. For example, the stairs in Figure 1 afford " climb-ability. " Conceptualizing affordances as "-abilities " has the benefit that they can be thought of as general properties of artifacts that can be designed for or against. This conceptualization has established the basis for many affordance-based