Towards a Formalization of Affordance Modeling in the Early Stages of Design

Abstract

When developing an artifact, designers must first capture and represent consumer needs. These needs can then be transformed into system requirements or objectives. This paper proposes a formalized affordance-based method for capturing consumer needs which leverages previous work in the area of Affordance-based design. The creation of an affordance basis and a relational structure (the Desired Affordance Model) facilitates the use of affordances to represent consumer needs. This formalization has the potential to improve model quality and consistency, while managing model creation time. Further, this formalization imposes a level of abstraction which forces solution independence but is capable of capturing the large range of consumer needs.

Principles for the definition of design structures

“…For example, Cormier, Olewnik, and Lewis (2013) give examples that, using the principles introduced in this paper, would be defined as separate design structures (compositions of affordances), related to each other through different user groups of the artefact under consideration. More broadly, relationships between design structures can be seen as akin to Suh's (1990) design matrices in that they are a means of relating (through mappings) design structures in different design domains (e.g., physical and functional).…”

“…Whilst Cormier et al infer a number of design structures, the examples they provide in the paper do not include sufficient detail across a single artefact to allow a detailed analysis and application of the principles introduced in this paper. Figure 8 shows a small example of a fragment of an affordance model from Cormier, Olewnik, and Lewis (2013) expressed as a design structure using the template from Figure 2. This example, illustrates how the principles for defining design structures in this paper might be applied to support affordance-based design.…”

“…With respect to thinking on the dual nature of technical artefacts, all of these approaches sit in a functional space imposed by people and are not intrinsic properties of the final design. For example, Cormier, Olewnik, and Lewis (2013) refer to 'Desired Affordance Models' and functional requirements may be expressed as shape models. The aero lines that specify the flow paths of air into the nose cowl of an aero engine are a conspicuous example of this.…”

Set-Based Thinking in the Engineering Design Community and Beyond

“…Maier and Fadel view an affordance-based approach as an alternative to function analysis, where affordances describe a potential behavior between two or more subsystems within a larger designerartifact-user complex system [45]. The goal is to articulate relationships that are unaccounted for in a function based approach to design, such as non-function based customer requirements [45,46]. Thus, an affordance-based approach, along with function structures, can enable set-based thinking.…”

How do consumers categorize new hybrid products?

“…Thus, affordance reflects the perception of the capacity of the object (product) to suggest its own use. This concept of affordance, borrowed from ecological psychology, has been applied in robotics and artificial intelligence (Dag, Atil, Kalkan, & Sahin, 2010), and in design (Cormier, Olewnik, & Lewis, 2014;Norman, 2002) but rarely in marketing. By departing from the perceptual register of the cognitive approach commonly used for categorization, we address an essential question, namely the role of affordance in the classification of new hybrid products by consumers.…”