Identifying affordances from online product reviews
Year: 2017
Editor: Anja Maier, Stanko Škec, Harrison Kim, Michael Kokkolaras, Josef Oehmen, Georges Fadel, Filippo Salustri, Mike Van der Loos
Author: Hou, Tianjun; Yannou, Bernard; Leroy, Yann; Poirson, Emilie; Mata, Ivan; Fadel, Georges
Series: ICED
Institution: 1: CentraleSupélec, Université Paris-Saclay, France; 2: École Centrale de Nantes, France; 3: Clemson University, United States of America
Section: Design Methods and Tools
Page(s): 267-276
ISBN: 978-1-904670-92-6
ISSN: 2220-4342
Abstract
Affordance based design is developed since the beginning of 21st century. Affordances being revealed properties of a system in a context, they may be much diverse and unexpected. Consequently, it is a utopia to think of enumerating all the existing precise affordances in advance. Presently, identifying affordances along a design or redesign process is based on experiments and focus groups, which are time and resource consuming. Although automatic identification strategies have been proposed, the lack of affordance database along with clear categorization technique makes it unpracticable and non-repeatable today. In this paper, the theoretical basis and technical basis of identifying affordances from online reviews are discussed. A framework of affordance identification is proposed by capturing constitutive affordance elements with natural language processing algorithms. Meanwhile, a case study of 303 review sentences of Kindle Paperwhite from Amazon.com is conducted with 1 expert in affordance based design and 6 participants. The result shows that the framework is effective in affordance identification. It provides basis for automating the identification process in the future.
Keywords: Design methods, Design engineering, Early design phases, Affordance based design, Online customer reviews