Affordances and Product Design to Support Environmentally Conscious Behavior

We developed an affordance-based methodology to support environmentally conscious behavior (ECB) that conserves resources such as materials, energy, etc. While studying concepts that aim to support ECB, we noted that characteristics of products that enable ECB tend to be more accurately described as affordances than functions. Therefore, we became interested in affordances, and specifically how affordances can be used to design products that support ECB. Affordances have been described as possible ways of interacting with products, or context-dependent relations between artifacts and users. Other researchers have explored affordances in lieu of functions as a basis for design, and developed detailed deductive methods of discovering affordances in products. We abstracted desired affordances from patterns and principles we observed to support ECB, and generated concepts based on those affordances. As a possible shortcut to identifying and implementing relevant affordances, we introduced the affordance-transfer method. This method involves altering a product's affordances to add desired features from related products. Promising sources of affordances include lead-user and other products that support resource conservation. We performed initial validation of the affordance-transfer method and observed that it can improve the usefulness of the concepts that novice designers generate to support ECB.