Concept Of Affordances Research Articles

Explicating affordances in travel information search: investigating device use in relation to goals and personal characteristics

Despite increasing attention to technology development and its impact on travel information search, research about information search behaviours across multiple devices (i.e., smartphones, laptops, tablets, and desktop computers) has received limited attention. Guided by technology affordance theory, this paper examines the link between device use and information search goals, and the relationship between personal characteristics and device use. The study is based on two independent studies. Data were collected using a mixed-methods approach utilising an online survey and an online trip planning diary. The findings revealed that information searchers were essentially multi-device users and switched between devices based on their information search goals. Moreover, personal characteristics such as demographic characteristics, experience and personality influenced device use. The findings of the research shed light on the elusive concept of affordance to enhance the understanding of the complexity of device usage during travel information search.

The Affordances of Videoconferencing Technology for Doing Interviews With Children Online: Methodological Explorations Based on a Critical Ethnography

In this article, we engage with the concept and theories of “affordance” in the adoption of digital tools to perform qualitative inquiry. We first raise the question of what is afforded when we use online digital tools such as Zoom to interview young children (5–10 years old) and then draw on empirical examples from our multi-sited critical ethnography with transnational Chinese children to illustrate our key methodological points. We lay out three dimensions along which the concept of affordance can be conceptualized: the relational, the embodied situational, and the social-cultural. We discuss the potential to map out a critical approach to enable qualitative researchers to practice reflexivity in technology-mediated qualitative research.

Factor Weight Analysis of Community Needs for Elderly Care Based on Crowd Attributes and Behavior Characteristics

Based on Gibson's concept of affordance and its methodological application in the design and the subject and object elements of "demand affordance, " ANP was used to solve the horizontal ties among the aspects of affordance, judge the research elements, SPSS correlation analysis was used to construct the judgment matrix, and a consistency test was conducted, establish a study on community function and behavior space design of elderly population under the dual coupling elements of functional needs and behavioral needs.

Competition Between Desired Competitive Result, Tolerable Homeostatic Disturbance, and Psychophysiological Interpretation Determines Pacing Strategy.

Scientific interest in pacing goes back >100years. Contemporary interest, both as a feature of athletic competition and as a window into understanding fatigue, goes back >30years. Pacing represents the pattern of energy use designed to produce a competitive result while managing fatigue of different origins. Pacing has been studied both against the clock and during head-to-head competition. Several models have been used to explain pacing, including the teleoanticipation model, the central governor model, the anticipatory-feedback-rating of perceived exertion model, the concept of a learned template, the affordance concept, the integrative governor theory, and as an explanation for "falling behind." Early studies, mostly using time-trial exercise, focused on the need to manage homeostatic disturbance. More recent studies, based on head-to-head competition, have focused on an improved understanding of how psychophysiology, beyond the gestalt concept of rating of perceived exertion, can be understood as a mediator of pacing and as an explanation for falling behind. More recent approaches to pacing have focused on the elements of decision making during sport and have expanded the role of psychophysiological responses including sensory-discriminatory, affective-motivational, and cognitive-evaluative dimensions. These approaches have expanded the understanding of variations in pacing, particularly during head-to-head competition.

THE COMPLEX SIMPLICITY OF CONTEXT. AFFORDANCES AS FLOWS OF SOCIAL INFORMATION

Affordances are central to consider how sociality and technology intertwine. However, while this entanglement propelled the popularity of the term, it also persistently connected the social and the technical. It is argued how considering affordances as eminently social opens up analytical possibilities to consider cultural, individual, and social contexts, and how these in turn can affect social action in digital environments. This means considering affordances as intersubjective and co-constructed, and posing them in relation to sociological tenets such as that of the social situation. Through 26 interviews with a variety of Reddit users, results suggest how affordances are understood and employed relationally to navigate complex social contexts, to infer dominant social norms and cultural codes and, once internalized, are deployed to sanction deviations or promote compliance to them. It is shown how the concepts of affordances and social situations can be fruitfully employed as an entry point into the cultural and social dynamics of groups and digital environments. Contextually, it challenges the idea of the social situation as a sociological concept rooted in physical interaction.

Prompting vegetable purchases in the supermarket by an affordance nudge: Examining effectiveness and appreciation in a set of field experiments

The supermarket is a promising location for stimulating healthier food choices by nudging interventions. However, nudging healthy food choices in the supermarket has shown weak effects to date. The present research introduces a new nudge based on the concept of affordances – i.e., an animated character – that invites interaction with healthy food products and examines its effectiveness and appreciation in a supermarket context. We present findings of a series of three studies. In Study 1, evaluations of the new nudge were collected, revealing that the nudge was appreciated. In Studies 2 and 3, field experiments were conducted to test the nudge's effect on vegetable purchases in a real-life supermarket. Study 3 demonstrated that vegetable purchases increased significantly (up to 17%) when the affordance nudge was placed on the vegetable shelves. Furthermore, customers appreciated the nudge and its potential for implementation. Taken together, this set of studies presents compelling findings illustrating the potential of the affordance nudge for increasing healthy choices in the supermarket.

A method for resolving organisation‐enterprise system misfits: An action research study in a pluralistic organisation

AbstractAlthough off‐the‐shelf enterprise systems (ES) have been widely adopted in organisations, the extant literature repeatedly documents ES failures caused by misfits between organisational processes and the ES. Although some misfits can be identified early in the ES lifecycle, others emerge in the onward and upward phase (i.e., after the implementation) and, hence, must be resolved reactively. Prior research on misfits and resolution strategies has primarily focused on the implementation phase, often assuming that close‐to‐perfect information on the misfit's nature and characteristics is available. However, no study has examined how to effectively complete a shared diagnosis and resolution of misfits when diverging individual user perceptions are taken as the starting point. Such situations may be particularly pronounced in pluralistic organisations, where a variety of interdependent processes and potentially competing perceptions of processes are prevalent. The main objective of this study is to address this gap. To this end, we propose a pragmatic method for the diagnosis and resolution of misfits between organisational processes and enterprise systems, which builds on an actionable conceptualization of misfits. This method builds on theoretical concepts of affordances, affordance actualization, user participation, and change agentry. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted an action research study in a university hospital. Our analysis focused on a specific misfit involving the hospital's ES‐supported clinical processes. The findings suggest that the method effectively diagnoses and resolves misfits and optimises the resources required for their resolution through efficient management of user participation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical contributions of our work.

Affordances and organizational functions

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

Cooperative affordances: How instant messaging apps afford learning, resistance and solidarity among food delivery workers

This paper aims to understand the practices and meanings associated with the creation and use of private chat groups on instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and WeChat that are accessible only to platform workers of online food delivery services. We draw on participant observation in five countries (Italy, Spain, Mexico, China, and India), in-depth interviews with 68 food delivery couriers and digital ethnography ( Pink et al., 2015 ) within dozens of online private chat groups of food delivery workers. Our fieldwork shows that private chat groups are extremely relevant in the daily work of delivery workers and are appropriated to restore forms of mutualism not afforded by the food delivery apps. Following Costa (2018) and her concept of affordances- in-practice, we describe how the practice of online private chat groups created by platform workers affords: (1) the emergence of communities of practice; (2) resistance and contempt; (3) mutualism and solidarity. We argue that these workers ‘enact’ the affordances of instant messaging apps, to supplement – from below – the affordances of food delivery apps that were denied or ignored by food delivery companies. We argue that these affordances constitute cooperative affordances. This concept captures the cooperative nature of peer-to-peer communication that occurs within the informal online chat groups created by the workers themselves. Finally, this article contributes to affordance theory by highlighting how affordances are not immanent properties of artifacts, or ‘invariants’, as argued by Gibson (1979) , but can be ‘enacted’ by specific users, like food delivery workers, within specific social and cultural contexts.

What's (in) Your Bowl? Affordances of Incantation Bowls and their Use in Household Medicine

Abstract: This paper investigates the much-discussed Babylonian incantation bowls inspired by approaches from thing theory, such as the concept of affordance, and from cognitive studies, such as the distributed cognition hypothesis. For once, the material aspects of the bowl amulets and how people may have perceived them are the center of the analysis, not the texts or the images that are inscribed in them. Thus, I discuss the different and versatile affordances ("options for action") that the bowls offered people living in late antique Mesopotamia and what their physical presence may have meant in terms of the production of an emotional response (affect). The preparation process of an incantation bowl, including the choice of bowl, ink preparation, and the procuration of suitable texts, may be seen as a sign of affect and emotion on behalf of several household members. These practices are ultimately very comparable to physical caregiving, and production of a bowl amulet is thereby shown to be firmly grounded in late antique Babylonian household medicine.

Defining affordability and adaptation resource prioritisation

Across Europe there is an increasing behavioural turn in flood risk management, focussing on individual behaviour and responsibilities. For example, a greater focus on implementing property-level resilience measures. A conclusion from this trend is that there are additional burdens being placed on the residents of flood-prone areas, in the hope of reducing their overall burden; therefore, we must understand the burden that is being created as we can unintentionally create new patterns of inequality in terms of who is and is not protected if certain individuals can be judged to be overburdened. This is particularly relevant in the aftermath of disaster events when there is a push to build resilience. One concept for measuring this aspect of the burden generated is affordability, which seeks to define and measure what a suitable burden on an actor is, and then can be targeted for additional assistance, for example, loans, vouchers, or subsidies to eliminate the burden. The concept of affordability can be used to identify how to best spend resources after a disaster event to support a process of ‘building back better’; however, the way this burden can be defined and addressed can also be influenced by different social justice considerations and definitions. This research explores the implications of different social justice concepts for defining what is a reasonable burden that can be placed on the individuals expected to adapt to and limit flood impacts and on the policy strategies and outcomes.

Material Ways of Looking: A Methodological Proposal for Visual and Material Culture Studies

<p>A problem facing art historians and scholars of visual and material culture studies is the white patriarchy that undergirds most visual culture produced in the western world, at least until recent times: whether paintings, book illustration, sculpture, advertising, or the environments that nourish and house these creations, both the producer and the intended viewer for the most part came from one demographic category. Building upon the concept of affordance, this essay questions object-human interactions to propose methodological approaches to visual culture that privilege the inclusion of otherwise siloed or marginalized people (women and people of colour, but also non-western people). By centering on the object represented in or through an image, this essay explores ways of detecting marginalized presence so to foment a more inclusive visual culture while formulating new types of questions that can be asked of our visualized world.</p>

지각된 어포던스를 통한 공간 분석 - 레지오 에밀리아 공간 이론을 바탕으로 -

In order to re-establish affordance theory in space and apply it to space design, the spatial composition method based on Legio Emilia’s educational theory concept was reinterpreted as affordance concept, and several cases were selected and analyzed from the spatial composition and interpretation. Previously, affordance in space was acted on or considered as a phenomenon in and out of space, such as furniture and decoration, but this study could confirm the possibility of a perceived affordance design by reconstructing a clear and specific process in constructing a space where perceived affordance and environment interact. By configuring various environments, a space with deeper human-centered interactions than the existing space is formed by causing collisions with users.

Exploring the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic on people's relationships with gardens

Gardens are places where science and art combine to create environments that often offer restorative and therapeutic experience to those who encounter them. During the Covid-19 pandemic, in the UK and elsewhere there has been a surge of interest in gardening. Public appreciation of gardens and other green spaces has grown and inequality of access to gardens and outdoor spaces has been extensively documented. Gardens are prevalent and of cultural significance in the UK, where their salutary properties have been documented for centuries. Yet people's relationships with gardens during the pandemic have been relatively underexplored in academia and were already under-researched prior to the pandemic's inception. This qualitative study investigates the relationships between people and gardens during the Covid-19 pandemic. Specifically, through thematic analysis based on in-depth interviews with 12 participants, it explores the effects that the pandemic had on people's relationships with gardens during an approximately 9-month period after the first national lockdown began in the UK. It places emphasis on health and wellbeing and garden design, using the concepts of agency and affordances as lenses through which to explore people's relationships with gardens. The results of this paper support others which have found people to be more supportive of nature-friendly garden design and to feel more connected with nature since the pandemic began.

A Novel Approach to Characterize State-level Food Environment and Predict Obesity Rate Using Social Media Data: Correlational Study

Community obesity outcomes can reflect the food environment to which the community belongs. Recent studies have suggested that the local food environment can be measured by the degree of food accessibility, and survey data are normally used to calculate food accessibility. However, compared with survey data, social media data are organic, continuously updated, and cheaper to collect. The objective of our study was to use publicly available social media data to learn the relationship between food environment and obesity rates at the state level. To characterize the caloric information of the local food environment, we used food categories from Yelp and collected caloric information from MyFitnessPal for each category based on their popular dishes. We then calculated the average calories for each category and created a weighted score for each state. We also calculated 2 other dimensions from the concept of access, acceptability and affordability, to build obesity prediction models. The local food environment characterized using only publicly available social media data had a statistically significant correlation with the state obesity rate. We achieved a Pearson correlation of 0.796 between the predicted obesity rate and the reported obesity rate from the Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System across US states and the District of Columbia. The model with 3 generated feature sets achieved the best performance. Our study proposed a method for characterizing state-level food environments only using continuously updated social media data. State-level food environments were accurately described using social media data, and the model also showed a disparity in the available food between states with different obesity rates. The proposed method should elastically apply to local food environments of different sizes and predict obesity rates effectively.

'It's a different way to do medicine': Exploring the affordances of telehealth for hepatitis C healthcare.

While the use of telehealth was common in hepatitis C healthcare in Australia in remote and regional areas prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, it has been used more broadly to improve access to hepatitis C heathcare during the pandemic. Despite its widespread uptake, little research has explored how telehealth shapes hepatitis C healthcare. In this article, we draw on the concept ofaffordances (Latour, 2002)and interviews with 25 healthcare practitioners to explore the emergent possibilities for hepatitis C care that take shape through telehealth. Despite suggestions that telehealth is comparable to in-person care, healthcare practitioners' accounts suggest that telehealth significantly changes the nature of their experience of providing healthcare for hepatitis C. According to these service practitioners, while it increased access to hepatitis C healthcare during the pandemic, it also afforded narrower, less personal healthcare encounters, with a focus on simple and singular issues, and reduced opportunities for communication and rapport. These affordances also discouraged the use of interpreters and by extension the inclusion of patients from non-English speaking backgrounds. However, the data collected also suggest that telehealth has the potential to afford more informal and relaxed healthcare environments and dispositions between healthcare practitioners and patients, potentially disrupting classic practitioner-patient power dynamics. In concluding, the article considers how telehealth models of care might better afford quality hepatitis C healthcare and care beyond COVID-19 pandemic conditions.

Defining affordances in social media research: A literature review

An increasingly influential strand of research on social media relies on the concept of affordances to account for effects. However, hindering the possibility of a unified theory of affordances in social media is the conceptual blurring surrounding the concept. This article engages in a comprehensive review of the affordances literature in social media, aiming to provide an overview of the current state of the art and clarify the use of the concept. Through a systematic literature review, the characteristics of affordances research in social media are uncovered: the most prominent areas of application, research approaches, and dominant typologies and conceptualisations. Significant blurriness of the term ‘affordance’ is identified as well as an inconsistent use in research. To tackle these problems, a unified definition of affordances in social media is proposed based on the synthesis of knowledge on affordances in technology and social media. The suggested definition captures the core aspects of the concept to reduce ambiguity in the use of the concept and further the research on affordances of social media. The article provides the groundwork for future use of affordances theory in social media research.

Affordances of musical instruments: Conceptual consideration.

While the concept of affordances has been applied in music research, it has not been satisfyingly developed regarding musical instruments. The resulting vagueness restricts the potential of the concept to guide exploration, discussion, and development of new approaches towards musical learning. Also, the concept of affordances comes with strong ontological claims and thus prompts the researcher to be careful when merging it with other theoretical domains or applying it in empirical studies. Consequently, the present article aims at contributing to a conceptualization of affordances of musical instruments by highlighting and discussing components that are necessary to consider in such a project. The first part consists of an overview of key elements of ecological psychology and more recent theoretical contributions, which are of relevance to the aim of the article: Material Engagement Theory, Skilled Intentionality Framework, and Sensorimotor Contingency Theory. A brief review of examples on how the concept of affordances has been applied in music research is presented. The main section of the article discusses four components, vital to further theoretical developments on affordances of musical instruments: the musical niche, spatial networks, sensorimotor relationship, and the amodal nature of affordances. Central to the argument is an understanding of affordances as relational, limited in scope and bound up with the physical interaction between musician and instrument. Accordingly, it is proposed that analytical focus in studies of musical instruments should be the sensorimotor relationship, spatiotemporally unfolding through a musical event. The article is concluded with comments upon educational implications of the presented perspective and suggestions on further research on the topic.

Experiencing an art education program through immersive virtual reality or iPad: Examining the mediating effects of sense of presence and extraneous cognitive load on enjoyment, attention, and retention.

Sense of presence and extraneous cognitive load (ECL) are the two psychological effects widely employed to explain the cognitive outcomes caused by high-immersive media (e. g., virtual reality). This study identified the concepts of both technological affordance (i.e., immersion) and the psychological effects of VR learning. It investigated the mechanism by which immersion leads to better or worse communication in the context of art education. We operationalized the concept of immersion into two levels: a high-immersive VR system (HTC VIVE Cosmos) and a low-immersive tablet system (iPad). Through a between-subject experiment, we found that higher immersion not only led to a greater sense of presence but also lowered extraneous cognitive load. Enjoyment and attention increased as a sense of presence rose but were not necessarily predicted by extraneous cognitive load. This study found that sense of presence was a more robust explanatory variable than ECL and that cognitive load could be lower in a high-immersive environment with content specifically designed for VR.

Implementing Affordance-Based Design Review Method Using Virtual Reality in Architectural Design Studio

In recent years, researchers in the architecture field have explored VR technology for various purposes in the architectural design process. Current efforts have supported the growing knowledge of VR utilization, specifically for the architectural design review process. In this study, we adapt the affordance concept from the ecological psychology study to add further evidence on VR utilization for the design review process. This study aims to develop an affordance-based design review method in architectural design by utilizing immersive VR technology. It sits at the crossroads of architecture design, virtual reality, and affordance research. This project aimed to create an affordance-based review method framework, a VR system to support the method, test both the method and the VR system, and assess the VR system’s effectiveness as a companion system for the affordance-based design method process. The study was conducted in the scope of architectural education settings only. It used a third-year architectural design studio course as a case. This study confirms that the affordance-based design review method using virtual reality helps students improve their design work. The method reveals the presence of positive and negative affordances in their work. It also shows the differences between a student and supervisor in perceiving the affordances for reviewing design works.