In this article we focus on the affordances and tangibilities of a web of non-electronic artifacts, and the different and partly overlapping roles and functionalities that characterizes this web of artifacts shows. We argue that an analysis of these affordances and the web of artifacts can be a resource for design, because they are evidence of some of the capabilities that are difficult to capt...

The interaction between humans and portable technologies, as a part of the broader problem of technology use in Human-Computer Interaction, has received considerable research attention and has been approached from diverse angles. The concept of affordance, drawn from ideas in the psychology of perception, is one of these angles. Unfortunately, most of these theories of perception which premise ...

With more than one third of the world’s population being online, the Internet has increasingly become part of modern living, giving rise to popular literature that often takes a teleological and celebratory perspective, heralding the Internet and Web 2.0 specifically, as an enabler of participation, democracy, and interactivity. However, one should not take these technological affordances of We...

In a series of three experiments requiring selection of real objects for action, we investigated whether characteristics of the planned action and/or the “affordances” of target and distractor objects affected interference caused by distractors. In all of the experiments, the target object was selected on the basis of colour and was presented alone or with a distractor object. We examined the e...

How can employees be qualified to provide sound customer advisory services? How can they be empowered to deliver the value of public sector modernization to customers? In this paper, we offer a novel approach to qualify service personnel on-the-job using “facilitation affordances”. In this approach, artifacts, providing appropriately designed facilitation affordances, are introduced into servic...

Ecological psychology applies insights of Darwinian theory and Gestalt principles to the understanding of perceptual processes. James J. Gibson developed a perceptual theory of "affordances", a neologism he adopted for the pivotal concept in a radical view of how interactive organism-environment features index the behaviors an organism may perform (perceived action possibilities). Gibson assert...

Convincing arguments for using critical realism as an underpinning for theories of IT-associated organizational change have appeared in the IS literature. A central task in developing such theories is to uncover the generative mechanisms by which IT is implicated in organizational change processes, but to do so, we must explain how critical realism’s concept of generative mechanisms applies in ...

OBJECTIVE To identify environment factors predicting sensory profile of infants between 4 and 18 months old. METHODS This cross-sectional study evaluated 97 infants (40 females e 57 males), with a mean age of 1.05±0.32 years with the Test of Sensory Functions in Infants (TSFI) and also asked 97 parents and 11 kindergarten teachers of seven daycare centers to answer the Affordances in the Home...

One of the main theories in ecological psychology is the theory of affordances. Affordances are opportunities for action which are provided by the environment in which the action takes place and are action specific. So affordances describe how the environment allows, supports and constrains an action. The idea of studying the affordances can also be applied to sport, in this case to putting in ...

Humans can perceive affordances both for themselves and for others, and affordance perception is a function of perceptual-motor experience involved in playing a sport. Two experiments investigated the enhanced affordance perception of athletes. In Experiment 1, basketball players and nonbasketball players provided perceptual reports for sports-relevant (maximum standing-reach and reach-with-jum...