User Interface Affordances in a Planning Representation

This article shows how the concept of affordance in the user interface fits into a well-understood artificial intelligence (AI) model of acting in an environment. In this model AI planning research is used to interpret affordances in terms of the costs associated with the generation and execution of operators in a plan. We motivate our approach with a brief survey of the affordance literature and its connections to the planning literature, and then explore its implications through examples of common user interface mechanisms described in affordance terms. Despite its simplicity, our modeling approach ties together several different threads of practical and theoretical work on affordance into a single conceptual framework. 1 INTRODUCTION An affordance is an ecological property of the relationship between an agent and the environment: "The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill" (Gibson, 1979, p.127) . For exam...