The Relationship Between Function and Affordance

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to attempt to clarify the concept of affordances, as introduced by Maier and Fadel, to relate affordances to function, to try to reduce confusion about both of these terms by providing a detailed model, and to expose some of the existing research on function to a wider audience. The paper starts by constructing a model of function that relates devices to an environment. We then extend the model to include goals. Next we express the concept of affordances in terms of the model already constructed. The paper concludes by discussing the impact that use of affordances might have on the designer’s pattern of reasoning.