Incorporating Affordances Into Product Architecture: Methodology and Case Study

The intention of this paper is to review the Function-TaskInteraction methodology and tools, which have been developed to link product functions and users’ tasks and to incorporate the concept of product affordances in product architecture development. This paper also aims to present the results of two investigations. The first was field research conducted with end users to assess their mental models of specific product architecture and related functions; the second was an investigation conducted with design experts from a global manufacturer of mobile communications products. Finally, this paper strives to expand the proposed methodology by introducing a new set of questions and a user-centric vocabulary for representing aspects of user-product interaction in Functional Modeling. The authors argue for the development of a controlled vocabulary to describe and label affordances.

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