IDENTIFYING AFFORDANCES

An affordance is what one system provides to another system. Originally introduced in the field of perceptual psychology by James Gibson, the concept of affordance has been proposed as a fundamental concept for engineering design by the authors in a recent series of papers. Recently the concept of affordance has begun to attract some attention within the engineering design research community. However, due to its background in psychology rather than engineering, the concept of affordance poses unique challenges for engineers to adopt in practical usage. This paper attempts to address one such challenge, the difficulty of identifying affordances. Four succinct methods for identifying affordances are discussed: pre-determination, direct experimentation, indirect experimentation, and automated identification.

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