The importance of affordance in Engineering design is well established. Artifacts that are able to activate spontaneous and immediate users? reactions are considered the outcome of good design practice.
A huge effort has been made by researchers for understanding affordances: yet these efforts have been somewhat elusive. In particular, they have been limited to case studies and experimental studies, usually involving a small subset of affordances. No systematic effort has been carried out to list all known affordance effects. This paper offers preliminary steps for such an ambitious effort.
We propose a set of three different approaches of Natural Language Processing techniques to be used to extract meaningful affordance information from the full text of patents: 1) a simple word search, 2) a lexicon of affordances and 3) a rule-based system.
The results give in-depth measures of how rare affordances in patents are, and a fine grain analysis of the linguistical construction of affordances. Finally, we show an interesting output of our method, that has detected affordances for disabled people, showing the ability of our system to automatically collect design-relevant knowledge.
This site uses cookies and other tracking technologies to assist with navigation and your ability to provide feedback, analyse your use of our products and services, assist with our promotional and marketing efforts, and provide content from third parties. Privacy Policy.
If so, you can sign-in to the website and get immediate access.
Not a Member Yet?
Membership is open to people with recognised qualifications and/or experience in the fields of design research, design practice, design management, and design education. Apply NOW
If you have forgotten your username or password, please enter the e-mail address you used during registration and press the submit button. We will send you an e-mail with your new password right after that.