Affordance-based design of physical interfaces for ubiquitous environments

Physical interfaces have been proposed as a way to realize natural interactions with ubiquitous computing environments. The successful design of such interfaces requires design approaches that integrate aspects of our world which are usually treated separately in traditional system development approaches. This paper describes a design approach based on Gibson concept of affordance. We demonstrate an experimental method for studying object affordance and show how it can be applied to the design of a concrete physical interface artefact.