This paper discusses how the theory of affordances can be used to investigate a spectrum opportunities, benefits, costs and risks is generated unevenly distributed by different kinds technology (where ‘technology’ understood as techniques, processes practices doing making, rather than technical artefacts systems). Affordances are possibilities for action, which arise from relations between huma...

Abstract In this paper, we bring together the concepts of affordance from ecological psychology and function organizational approach to philosophy biology into a single integrative framework. This integration allows us account for biological basis notion affordance, offering theoretical tools address normative interrelations between organisms their environments.

While the affordances of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) for teaching and learning are a subject of numerous experience reports, there is little research on educators’ perceptions of various MUVE affordances claimed in the literature. We investigate the educators’ perceptions of claimed MUVE affordances for learning by conducting in-depth semi-structured interviews with 22 educators (11...

In this article, I argue that affordances are properties of the animal–environment system, that is, that they are emergent properties that do not inhere in either the environment or the animal. I critique and review the formal definition of affordance offered by Turvey (1992). Turvey defined affordances as properties of the environment; I discuss some consequences of this and argue that Turvey’...

Even though aesthetics and affordances are two important factors based on which designers provide effective ways of interaction through their artifacts, there is no study or theoretical model that relates these two aspects of design. We suggest a theoretical explanation that relates the underlying functionality of aesthetics, in particular, of interaction aesthetics and of affordances in the de...

We propose situated affordances as an extension to the well known concept of affordances. Situated affordances extend affordances by taking the environmental context, in which an object is embedded, into account. We argue that the extended concept allows the learning of qualitatively more complex tasks. In this paper we report the conceptual result of ongoing work in which a cognitive robotic a...

Business intelligence (BI) becomes increasingly important and is an evolving topic in research and practice. The evolvement of BI, the flexibility of BI systems, and their context-dependency entail diverse and partially contradicting results on BI system use and outcomes. This study examines how and why BI systems are used differently and what the entailing outcomes are. With the theoretical le...

Recent studies have emphasized the potential of Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) for companies. However, so far, researchers have paid little attention to usages and affordances of ESN. To investigate this research issue, we anchor our analysis on Leonardi’s Affordances Theory. A case study has been conducted in a large French company, where we conducted thirty-five interviews with users of an ...

We propose the use of perceived affordances to computationally model linguistic concepts in situated language use. Perceived affordances are mental structures that capture the relationship between the language user and the embedding situation. We employ computational models of human perceived affordances to understand situated language: language that dynamically depends on the current physical ...

Frequently physical affordances are considered one of the main advantages of tangible interfaces or input devices, making interaction intuitive. This assumption may be overly simplistic – because physical objects have a multitude of physical affordances and properties, it is difficult for the designer to restrict these to (only) those that match with the digital system that they are connected w...