Qualified Affordance-based Design

167 Pages·2016·5.35 MB·English

Clemson University
TigerPrints
All Theses Theses
5-2012
Qualified Affordance-based Design
Jun Hu
Clemson University, [email protected]
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https://tigerprints.clemson.edu/all_theses/1171
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QUALIFIED AFFORDANCE-BASED DESIGN

A Thesis
Presented to
the Graduate School of
Clemson University

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
Master of Science
Mechanical Engineering

by
Jun Hu
May 2012

Accepted by:
Dr. Georges M. Fadel, Committee Chair
Dr. Joshua D. Summers
Dr. Gregory M. Mocko
Dr. Jonathan R.A. Maier
ABSTRACT
Function-based approaches are taught by the engineering design community and
implemented in practice. The most significant advantage of these approaches is that they
can guide the designers to abstract the essential problems from the design requirements,
build the function-based models, and consequently provide the direction of the solution.
However, due to the lack of a consistent scientific definition on the meaning of the
function, these approaches may be contradictory when representing human-centered
aspects, features, and non-physical purposes. To address this issue, design researchers
have pursued two general directions: (1) broadening the meaning of function and (2)
introducing an alternative scientific concept such as “affordance” or “wirk” to
compensate for the weaknesses of the functional descriptions. Research on affordance is
the focus in this thesis. Although the term affordance has been introduced in design
methodology, some significant details like representation, categorization, and application
into mechanical design still need to be further studied.
Therefore, this thesis starts by analyzing the ambiguity of function in design to
support the necessity of involving affordances, and then reviews and compares the usages
of affordance in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), design,
psychology, and philosophy. The research opportunities are identified from the review
and the comparison of the various approaches. One of the opportunities is to qualify the
affordance-based design. Therefore, a new categorization of affordances applicable for
product design is proposed, including doing and happening Artifact-Artifact Affordances
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(dAAA and hAAA), doing and happening Artifact-Environment Affordances (dAEA and
hAEA), and doing and happening Artifact-User Affordances (dAUA and hAUA).
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DEDICATION
To my parents
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I don‟t know what words can express my gratitude to Dr. Georges Fadel for
his wise guidance and continuous patience during my study and research over the past
two years. He is always willing to help when my research encounters a bottleneck. It has
been a pleasure to work with him and I believe that I have learned a lot from him. I also
take this opportunity to thank Dr. Jonathan Maier and Dr. Paolo Guarneri for sharing
their ideas in the early stage of my research and later on helping identify the problems in
my proposal ahead of this thesis. I would also like to thank Dr. Joshua Summers and Dr.
Gregory Mocko for supporting me throughout this research.
I would also say thank you to all the student members of the Clemson
Engineering Design Application and Research (CEDAR) group. I always obtained bright
sparks from the teamwork in the group. I especially cherish the time cooperating with
Manh Tien Nguyen visiting CEDAR from the Technical University of Munich. We
worked in the same area for half a year and discussed a lot on the research.
In addition, I am grateful to Dr. Jiquan Yang from Nanjing Normal University
and Dr. Sabrish Babu and his group from the School of Computing at Clemson
University for their significant and unselfish help during the building of the VR treadmill.
I want to also thank Ms. Barbara Ramirez from the Department of English at Clemson
University for correcting my English writing in this thesis.
Last but not least, I dedicate this thesis with love and gratitude to my parents for
their unwavering support in the past twenty five years.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... ii
DEDICATION.................................................................................................................. iv
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ................................................................................................ v
TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................ vi
LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................... viii
LIST OF FIGURES .......................................................................................................... x
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION................................................................................. 1
1.1 Motivation ................................................................................................................. 1
1.2 Thesis overview ......................................................................................................... 2
CHAPTER 2: CONCEPTS REVIEW ......................................................................... 4
2.1 Function .................................................................................................................... 4
2.2 Affordance ............................................................................................................... 12
CHAPTER 3: QUESTIONS AND HYPOTHESES ................................................. 35
CHAPTER 4: CATEGORIZING AFFORDANCES FOR DESIGN...................... 38
4.1 Building the spreadsheet of affordances ................................................................. 38
4.2 Evaluating the current schemes .............................................................................. 40
4.3 Proposing a new scheme for product design .......................................................... 54
4.4 The affordance-based interaction models ............................................................... 63
4.5 Summary ................................................................................................................. 71
CHAPTER 5: CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK ........................................ 72
5.1 Research Contributions .......................................................................................... 72
5.2 Answering the Research Question .......................................................................... 73
5.3 Research Results ..................................................................................................... 74
5.4 Future Research Opportunities ............................................................................... 74
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APPENDIX A: SPREADSHEET OF SUMMARIZING AFFORDANCES USED IN
LITERATURE ................................................................................................................ 76
APPENDIX B: CATEGORIZING THE SUMMARIZED AFFORDANCES BASED
ON THE NINE CATEGORIZATION SCHEMES ..................................................... 90
APPENDIX C: CATEGORIZING THE SUMMARIZED AFFORDANCES BASED
ON THE NEW CATEGORIZATION PROPOSED IN THE RESEARCH ............. 94
APPENDIX D: AFFORDANCES IN THE DESIGN OF A VR TREADMILL ..... 108
D.1 Preprocessing in conceptual design .................................................................... 108
D.2 The mechanical subsystem ................................................................................... 113
D.3 The VR subsystem................................................................................................. 136
D.4 The control subsystem .......................................................................................... 138
D.5 Limitations in the prototype ................................................................................. 143
D.6 Discussion ............................................................................................................ 145
REFERENCES .............................................................................................................. 147

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LIST OF TABLES

Table Page
Table 2.1: Example of relevant conjugate variables (Paihès et al., 2010) .......................... 6
Table 2.2: Comparison of affordance as defined by Gibson and Norman (McGrenere and
Ho, 2000) .......................................................................................................................... 13
Table 2.3: Affordance representations in Maier and Fadel‟s case studies (2009) of a
vacuum cleaner and an automotive window switch ......................................................... 16
Table 2.4: Affordances types (Hartson, 2003) .................................................................. 21
Table 2.5: Affordances structured with the means-end hierarchy (Albrechtsen et al., 2001)
........................................................................................................................................... 22
Table 3.1: Research questions, hypotheses and tasks ....................................................... 37
Table 4.1: The categorizations of affordances in literature .............................................. 40
Table 4.2: Ten collected items are not viewed as affordances ......................................... 42
Table 4.3: Pols‟ four categories of affordances and the corresponding examples (Pols,
2011) ................................................................................................................................. 52
Table 4.4: The statistic results of the new categorization in the spreadsheet ................... 61
Table 5.1: Answers to the research question .................................................................... 74
Table 0.1: Partial requirements list of the VR treadmill ................................................. 109
Table 0.2: Power devices comparison ............................................................................ 115
Table 0.3: Mechanism comparison ................................................................................. 117
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Table 0.4: Energy-based representation of forces and movements (Paihès et al., 2010) 123
Table 0.5: The situations determine the RMA and TMA of links .................................. 124
Table 0.6: The analysis of hAAAs for the mechanism in Figure 0.9 ............................. 127
Table 0.7: The analysis of hAAAs of the mechanism in Figure 0.19 ............................. 133
Table 0.8: Experiment to test the relationship between PWM values and the speed of the
push rod ........................................................................................................................... 140
Table 0.9: Calculate the average W from -8° to 0°, according to the different PWM values
from 60% to 100% .......................................................................................................... 143

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