The Case for Design Affordances

The recurring interest in affordances in design studies has produced a disparate body of knowledge and opinion that equally inspires and frustrates. Based on the belief that the concept does hold significance promise for understanding and analyzing interaction, the present paper is an attempt to clarify existing concepts, draw new connections between existing concepts and fill in some missing pieces with new concepts for the deployment of affordances in design. The key contribution of the paper is the distinction between probable user affordances designers intuitively perceive in their designs and affordances they perceive in external and internal representations they use in designing. The former are common to most people, while the latter require some training in or acquaintance with design and its representations. Foundational to the above are the notion of the inbetweenness of technologies and the levels of analysis in activity theory and action identification theory, as well as graph-based design representations for describing both environments and user actions/interactions.