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Breaking affordance: culture as context

Published: 23 October 2004 Publication History

Abstract

The concept of affordance as it applies to user interface design is widely used and accepted; possibly overused. This paper explores one of the constraints on affordance: culture. Graduate and undergraduate students in the United Kingdom and the United States were surveyed and asked to make judgements about the behaviour of abstracted Western-like objects. The study clearly shows that UK subjects thought the down position of a light switch indicates it is "ON"; for their US counterparts it was "OFF." We suggest that context (in the case of this study, culture) is often overlooked, but is central to affordance, to computer interface design, as well as to action and activity more generally.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
NordiCHI '04: Proceedings of the third Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction
October 2004
472 pages
ISBN:1581138571
DOI:10.1145/1028014
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 October 2004

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  1. affordance
  2. culture
  3. design context

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NordiCHI04
NordiCHI04: NordiCHI 2004
October 23 - 27, 2004
Tampere, Finland

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Overall Acceptance Rate 379 of 1,572 submissions, 24%

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