Breaking affordance: culture as context

The concept of affordance as it applies to user interface design is widely used and accepted; possibly overused. This paper explores one of the constraints on affordance: culture. Graduate and undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and the United States were surveyed and asked to make judgements about the behaviour of abstracted Western-like objects. The study clearly shows that UK subjects thought the down position of a light switch indicates it is "ON"; for their US counterparts it was "OFF." We suggest that context (in the case of this study, culture) is often overlooked, but is central to affordance, to computer interface design, as well as to action and activity more generally.

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