Towards Situation‐Aware Affordances: An Experimental Study

In the future interactive environments will offer more and more functionality. With this increased functionality the need for mechanisms enabling easy system exploration will grow. Designing object affordances is a classic way of influencing explorability. However, affordances can not give clues about the combined use of objects in tasks with higher complexity. Equally, they can not adapt themselves to the situation at hand. In this paper we present and evaluate a system that extends the idea of classic affordances by presenting small amounts of instructions at the right time and at the right place. We evaluate this concept using the example of a standard flatpack wardrobe extended with light emitting diodes (LED’s) on each board. These LED’s display the assembly instructions in a proactive way by adapting the information with each movement the user makes. The experiment presented compares the use of paper instructions with the proposed LED based instructions. As result, LED’s proved sufficient to even produce a measurable time gain. To test intuitivity and usability of the instructions a comparison between instructions in different modalities is carried out.