From Hybridization to Modularity: The Affordance of Variable-Geometry Innovations Design: An Abstract

Abstract

In the high tech field, we are witnessing the proliferation of variable-geometry innovations with shape-shifting structures and architectures, combining different categories of products into a single one called New Hybrid Products (NHP). The design of these products informs the user about their affordance. This ability of design to suggest the potential uses of new hybrid products can be considered by companies to emphasize the distinctiveness and to facilitate the understanding, categorization, evaluation and adoption of new hybrid products.Our article poses some fundamental questions to designers about the place of affordance in the design of communicating new hybrid products and how to anticipate this affordance precisely in the case of variable-geometry innovations design (e.g. monolithic (made of a single block), protean (able to change shape) or modular (formed of various removable parts) designs).A qualitative study, which involved Hi-Tech design experts, explores the importance of variable-geometry innovations affordance and its implications on their willingness to conceive them. Our findings confirm the divergence in the literature on communicating new hybrid products affordance. The result of the study with the Hi-Tech design experts reveals the non-existence of a consensus on this issue. This divergence is visible as much for existing monolithic communicating NHPs such as smartphones and tablets as for the polymorphic communicating NHP studied in our research, namely, the « Flip phone ».Depending on whether the communicating new hybrid product has a monolithic or polymorphic form, it may or may not be perceived as affordant. Therefore, designers of communicating new hybrid products are reluctant to design these variable-geometry hybrid products. They prefer simple monolithic products to hybrid shape-shifting products, considered as difficult to understand, not at all intuitive and not very affordant.In addition to this multitude of issues raised, the theoretical and managerial implications of the study are finally addressed.KeywordsAffordanceDesignInnovationNew product development