"Affordance of Everyday Things" revisited in light of Morphing Interactive Devices (MIDs)

This project proposes to radically rethink the concept of affordance in light of the emergence of Morphing Interactive Devices (MIDs). Affordance is a concept widely used in the field of HCI and defines the quality of an object to tell us how to use it. The concept has been instrumental in the design of everyday systems such as graphical user interfaces and is also largely used by industrial designers to guide the form of static objects. However, a revolution has been emerging in numerous fields of engineering, allowing the shape of interactive devices to go beyond the static and rigid form factors (e.g. bendable OLED touchscreens or reconfigurable devices). New forms of computers are malleable and can even reconfigure on their own to provide better affordance on demand. As such, a radical rethink is required in designing the shape of interactive devices. This PhD project aims at addressing this challenge. The ultimate goal is to establish a framework based on empirical data that can generalise the concept of affordance - bringing more rigor to the design of MIDs.

This project falls within the EPSRC researcher area: Human Computer Interaction (ICT).