Designing Smart Objects to Support Affording Situations: Exploiting Affordance Through an Understanding of Forms of Engagement

Abstract

In this paper I consider how the concept of “affordance” has been adapted from the original writings of Gibson and applied to interaction design. I argue that a clear understanding of affordance shifts the goal of interaction design from one of solely focusing on either the physical object or the capabilities of the person, toward an understanding of interactivity. To do this, I develop the concept of Forms of Engagement, originally proposed to account for tool use. Finally, I extend this concept to interacting with modified tangible user interfaces, or “animate objects.” These animate objects not only sense how they are being used, but also communicate with each other to develop a shared intent, and provide prompts and cues to encourage specific actions. In this way, the human-object-environment system creates affording situations in pursuit of shared intentions and goals. In order to determine when to provide prompts and cues, the objects need to have a model of how they ought to be used and what intention they are being used to achieve. Consequently, affordances become not only the means by which actions are encouraged but also the manner in which intentions are identified and agreed.

Taking Others' Perspectives Enhances Situation Awareness in the Smart Home Interface

“…In addition, the complexity of the stimulus in Experiment 2 was relatively increased as compared to Experiment 1. Thus, it may have contributed to recognizing affordances that are usually processed implicitly (Baber, 2018) in Experiment 2.…”

“…Such interaction problems caused by co-users could be solved by understanding affordances in the smart home interface. Affordances refer not only to the interpretation of an object or environment (Norman, 1999) but also to inducing a user's behavior in pursuit of a shared intention and goal through understanding the interaction (Baber, 2018). An advantage of this affordance is that it can make users automatically and tacitly perform certain behaviors with little mental effort (Grgic et al, 2016).…”

Varieties of Artifacts: Embodied, Perceptual, Cognitive, and Affective

“…3 Clark (2003) does not talk about the way artifacts and affective systems are integrated. 4 Baber (2003Baber ( , 2018 adopts a different approach to mapping the relations between embodied agents and their artifactual world, focusing on the Gibsonian notion of affordance. See Rietveld and Kiverstein (2014) for a similar Gibsonian approach.…”

Analogical Reasoning for Visually Grounded Language Acquisition

“…This evaluation aims at assessing whether the predicted results follow human commonsense in the real world. Affordance is a binary relationship between each noun and verb, which indicates whether a certain verb is typical to involve a certain noun as an argument [4,16]. For examples, "cutting pizza" and "cutting carrot" happen in our daily life, but we never see "cutting plate" or "cutting water".…”