Affordance based design: a relational theory for design

International Journal of Computer Integrated Manufacturing, 2015

Different kinds of design structure are created and used in engineering design and development processes. Function structures, design grammars and bills of materials are common examples. However, there is a lack of clarity regarding distinctions and similarities between different kinds of structure and systematic ways to articulate them. This paper brings together research on product structuring and shape computation to inform the specification of principles for the definition of design structures. The principles draw together findings reported in the computational geometry and product definition literature with research from a range of companies and industry sectors that encompasses enterprise and process structures. The potential value of the principles to computer-integrated manufacturing and through-life support is demonstrated through application to four case studies.

Design Science

Designers can involve users in the design process. The challenge lies in reaching multiple users and finding the best way to use their input in the design process. Affordance based design (ABD) is a design method that focuses in part on the perceived or existing interactions between the user and the artifact. The shape and physical characteristics of the product enable the user to perceive some of its affordances. The goal of this research is to use ABD, along with an optimization tool, to evolve the shape of products toward better perceived solutions using the input from users. A web application has been developed that evolves design concepts using an interactive multi-objective genetic algorithm (IGA) relying on the user assessment of product affordances. As a proof of concept, a steering wheel is designed using the application by having users rate specific affordances of solutions presented to them. The results show that the design concepts evolve toward better perceived solution...

Vocations and Learning

Despite the growing use of virtual environments for training in complex industrial settings, we have little understanding of how these innovative settings transform training and trainers everyday work. This study investigates the instructional use of an industrial building’s virtual environment by expert trainers during a training session for nuclear power plant field operators. Drawing from the course-of-action theoretical and methodological framework, field notes, continuous video-recording of the training sessions and verbalisations during post-training self-confrontation interviews with the trainers were collected and analysed. The results point out four typical instructional uses of the virtual environment in authentic settings: (a) showing the material elements and spatial layout of certain areas of the reactor building, (b) displaying safe and typical paths through the building, (c) explaining functional aspects to help trainees develop an operating model of the nuclear build...

Information and Learning Sciences

Purpose Introducing technology at work presents a special challenge as learning is tightly integrated with workplace practices. Current design-based research (DBR) methods are focused on formal learning context and often questioned for a lack of yielding traceable research insights. This paper aims to propose a method that extends DBR by understanding tools as sociocultural artefacts, co-designing affordances and systematically studying their adoption in practice. Design/methodology/approach The iterative practice-centred method allows the co-design of cognitive tools in DBR, makes assumptions and design decisions traceable and builds convergent evidence by consistently analysing how affordances are appropriated. This is demonstrated in the context of health-care professionals’ informal learning, and how they make sense of their experiences. The authors report an 18-month DBR case study of using various prototypes and testing the designs with practitioners through various data colle...

Journal of Mechanical Design

A critical task in product design is mapping information from consumer to design space. Currently, this process largely depends on designers identifying and mapping psychological and consumer level factors to engineered attributes. In this way, current methodologies lack provision to test a designer's cognitive reasoning and could introduce bias when mapping from consumer to design space. In addition, current dominant frameworks do not include user–product interaction data in design decision making, nor do they assist designers in understanding why a consumer has a particular perception about a product. This paper proposes a framework—cyber-empathic (CE) design—where user–product interaction data are acquired using embedded sensors. To gain insight into consumer perceptions relative to product features, a network of psychological constructs is utilized. Structural equation modeling (SEM) is used as the parameter estimation and hypothesis testing technique, making the framework f...

IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science

Development of a built environment encompasses urban design, land use, transportation system, and accommodates patterns of human activity within the physical environment. Holistic development of built environment requires a multidisciplinary design team of urban planners, architects and sustainability advisors from an early design stage. Literature and industry-practices show growth of designer’s techniques and competencies, sustainable development capabilities, and user-centric prospective in the early design. However, there is a lack of systematic method and all-inclusive approach to design a built environment. Thus, proposed research aims to develop a design method which is user-inspired, stakeholder conducive and environmentally conscious from an early design stage. To achieve this aim, an affordance-based design method is proposed and demonstrated through a case study of university campus. Affordance-based design method has been used for design of complex systems by capturing u...

Proceedings of the Design Society, 2021

Therapy in early childhood is facilitated through toys and play. While mainstream toys are designed for children, therapeutic toys need to satisfy requirements from clinicians, caregivers, and children. The study presented in this paper investigated the challenges that 22 international toy designers encounter during the design process and whether support is required when developing products for speech and language therapy, through a mixed-method approach. Results show that considerable challenges are encountered during the early design stages. Nonetheless, the toy design process remains unsupported, while no support is available for designers to consider therapeutic needs. Based on the feedback received, eleven requirements were identified upon which a user-centred design support framework was proposed to assist toy designers during the task clarification stage, taking into account the affordances that therapeutic toys should have without inhibiting the creative process.

Computational Studies on Cultural Variation and Heredity, 2018

This position paper commences with a brief overview of where the cultural DNA may lie in the enterprise of designing. It puts forward the concept that cultural DNA is not a unitary concept and needs to be treated multi-dimensionally deriving from multiple sources. The paper outlines research that supports cultural DNA research in design.

2013

The use of social media creates the opportunity to turn organization-wide knowledge sharing in the workplace from an intermittent, centralized knowledge management process to a continuous online knowledge conversation of strangers, unexpected interpretations and re-uses, and dynamic emergence. We theorize four affordances of social media representing different ways to engage in this publicly visible knowledge conversations: metavoicing, triggered attending, network-informed associating, and generative role-taking. We further theorize mechanisms that affect how people engage in the knowledge conversation, finding that some mechanisms, when activated, will have positive effects on moving the knowledge conversation forward, but others will have adverse consequences not intended by the organization. These emergent tensions become the basis for the implications we draw.

Journal of Mechanical Design, 2013

We developed an affordance-based methodology to support environmentally conscious behavior (ECB) that conserves resources such as materials, energy, etc. While studying concepts that aim to support ECB, we noted that characteristics of products that enable ECB tend to be more accurately described as affordances than functions. Therefore, we became interested in affordances, and specifically how affordances can be used to design products that support ECB. Affordances have been described as possible ways of interacting with products, or context-dependent relations between artifacts and users. Other researchers have explored affordances in lieu of functions as a basis for design, and developed detailed deductive methods of discovering affordances in products. We abstracted desired affordances from patterns and principles we observed to support ECB, and generated concepts based on those affordances. As a possible shortcut to identifying and implementing relevant affordances, we introduc...

Artificial Intelligence for Engineering Design, Analysis and Manufacturing, 2015

Function-based design approaches have been criticized for being too narrow to properly guide design. Specifically, they are said to be unable to cope with nonfunctional considerations, such as cost or maintenance issues without invoking other concepts, such as constraints. This paper investigates two alternative conceptualizations of the design process: the practical affordance-based design approach, as elaborated by Maier and Fadel, and the more theoretical use plan approach by Houkes and Vermaas. This paper compares function-, affordance-, and use plan-based design approaches. It highlights strengths and weaknesses of each approach and proposes a definition of the function of an artifact in terms of its affordances.

Gestão & Produção, 2010

É um desafio acompanhar o ritmo imposto pela conjuntura atual, na qual inovações tecnológicas, maiores exigências do mercado e tantas outras características têm tornado as empresas mais ágeis naquilo que desenvolvem. Com isso, o processo de desenvolvimento de produtos tem se tornado perigoso à medida que pula etapas cruciais, em detrimento de mais rapidez na colocação do produto no mercado. Os modelos de desenvolvimento de produtos são a forma de sequenciar as etapas necessárias à concepção de um produto. Um dos mais conhecidos é o desenvolvido pelos alemães, Gerhard Pahl e Wolfgang Beitz, pertencentes à escola semântica de projeto. Ela é analisada, minuciosamente, neste artigo, e pontos que podem ser aperfeiçoados no intuito de oferecer maior segurança aos produtos por ela desenvolvidos, são propostos. Ao final, 11 pontos são apresentados como propostas de melhoria para o método estudado, seguidos de explicações e justificativas baseadas em bibliografia referente ao assunto.

European Journal of Information Systems, 2020

Wildlife management is becoming increasingly critical to improving the sustainability of biodiversity and the welfare of human beings. This paper uses affordance as a lens to explore the design of information systems that can assist in managing wildlife in protected areas. Through an action design research (ADR) study with a forest department, we develop and test design principles for a class of wildlife management analytics system (WMAS). We identify the initial design principles, including elements of the action potential, materiality, and boundary condition, and iteratively refine them based on an instantiation of WMAS through two iterations of design and implementation cycles. Through our work, we contribute to design knowledge by abstracting the artefacts, design principles in particular, and the ADR approach by generalising two new activities and corresponding principles when designing analytical models. Our findings can also be used to address a class of similar problems and systems in practice.

Proprioception, 2020

Proprioception considered as the obtaining of information about one’s own action does not necessarily depend on proprioceptors. At the knee joint, perceptual systems are active sets of organs designed to reach equilibrium through synergies. Many surgical procedures, such as ACL reconstruction in personalized medicine, are often based on native anatomy, which may not accurately reflect the proprioception between native musculoskeletal tissues and biomechanical artifacts. Taking an affordance-based approach to this type of “design” brings valuable new insights to bear in advancing the area of “evidence-based medicine (EBM).” EBM has become incorporated into many health care disciplines, including occupational therapy, physiotherapy, nursing, dentistry, and complementary medicine, among many others. The design process can be viewed in terms of action possibilities provided by the (biological) environment. In anterior crucial ligament (ACL) reconstruction, the design goal is to avoid li...

Journal of Global Information Management

Virtual worlds are progressing toward a holistic abstraction of the metaverse. While there is abundant literature and synthesis on virtual worlds and related constructs, the linkages between above scholarly work and the “metaverse” are scarce. This research study addresses this gap by focusing on three specific research pursuits: a comprehensive definition of the metaverse that subsumes virtual world literature and looks at the metaverse as a sociotechnical stack, exploring the design elements of the metaverse, and a synthesis of future research direction associated with metaverse. For achieving the above goals, a hybrid research methodology comprising bibliometric analysis and a rigorous qualitative analysis of case studies across four major metaverse players with varied end goals was employed. The interpretive qualitative analysis was further distilled by mapping the emergent themes to the theoretical lens of affordances. This work presents a novel framework of metaverse design, e...

Public Money & Management, 2020

By combining the traditional literature on public administration and public management with that on Human-Computer Interaction, this paper contributes to the debate about how digital technology can support the co-creation of public value in co-production activities. We examine two case studies of participatory requirements elicitation for a technology aimed to support the co-design of a childcare service. By observing that the digital technology is requested to satisfy "ancillary values" that constrain how the coproduction is operated, our analysis clarifies how the instrumental and the institutional roles of the technology intersect and fulfill each other.

Aslib Journal of Information Management, 2020

PurposeThis study examines Iran-US migrants' use of the most popular messaging application in Iran—Telegram—and shows how they use it to manage their migration information practices.Design/methodology/approachThis study took a qualitative observation approach. Over the course of six months, over 80 h of observations were conducted on Iran-US migration-related settings within Telegram.FindingsThis work identifies the information practices that emerge as users seek and share information related to Iran-US migration. Telegram plays a vital role across the immigration stages, predominantly in the pre-migration stage. This work also shows how the constraints and features of Telegram influence users' information sharing and seeking practices.Practical implicationsThe findings support the implication that a social media platform that provides multiple ways to interact is likely to better support niche or unanticipated uses.Originality/valueThis study is the first of its kind to exp...

Anatomical Sciences Education, 2018

Human anatomical specimen museums are commonly used by medical, nursing, and paramedical students. Through dissection and prosection, the specimens housed in these museums allow students to appreciate the complex relationships of organs and structures in more detail than textbooks could provide. However, it may be difficult for students, particularly novices, to identify the various parts of these anatomical structures without additional explanations from a docent or supplemental illustrations. Recently, augmented reality (AR) has been used in many museum exhibits to display virtual objects in videos captured from the real world. This technology can significantly enhance the learning experience. In this study, three AR‐based support systems for tours in medical specimen museums were developed, and their usability and effectiveness for learning were examined. The first system was constructed using an AR marker. This system could display virtual label information for specimens by capt...

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

The outbreak of COVID-19 forced schools to swiftly transition from in-person classes to online or remote offerings, making educators and learners alike rely on online videoconferencing platforms. Platforms like Zoom offer audio-visual channels of communication and include features that are designed to approximate the classroom experience. However, it is not clear how students' learning experiences are affected by affordances of the videoconferencing platforms or what underlying factors explain the differential effects of these affordances on class experiences of engagement, interaction, and satisfaction. In order to find out, we conducted two online survey studies: Study 1 (N = 176) investigated the effects of three types of videoconferencing affordances (i.e., modality, interactivity, and agency affordances) on class experience during the first two months after the transition to online learning. Results showed that usage of the three kinds of affordances was positively correlat...