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IADIS International Conference WWW/Internet 2010MAKING SENSE OF THE AFFORDANCE CONCEPT INTHE 3 RD HCI PARADIGMLara Schibelsky Godoy Piccolo* and Maria Cecília Calani Baranauskas***Fundação CPqD / IC - UNICAMP**IC/NIED - UNICAMPABSTRACTSince Norman’s appropriation of Gibson’s conception of affordance to explain the design of products and technologies,this mainstream HCI concept has changed to reflect the evolution in the artifacts we interact with. This paper sheds lighton how the concept of affordance has been transformed in keeping with the changes in the HCI field. An observationalstudy was conducted aiming at identifying physical, perceived, social, and motivational affordances of the iPad ® and of aTablet-PC. The study clarified how the different types of affordances can explain the relation between human andtechnology in this new technical and social scenario named 3 rd HCI paradigm.KEYWORDSPhysical affordances, social affordances, Human-Computer Interaction, HCI paradigms.1. INTRODUCTIONThe field of Human Computer Interaction (HCI) has developed along its last 30 years motivated by the needof understanding our relationship with computers and artifacts of technology in general. This relationship haschanged dramatically along that time, as a consequence of the technology design, which extrapolated thelimits of work environments, now being part of our life in almost all aspects of it. As a consequence,mainstream concepts should be rethought, as user and technology are part of a larger system - or set ofsystems. This movement of understanding design as a systemic issue has raised several debates withimplications on the fundamentals, methods and goals both for research and practice in the discipline.As Sellen et al. (2009) suggest in redefining the “H”, the “C”, and the “I” in face of the transformationsthe field has passed through, several levels of interaction should be taken into account: interactions on and inthe body, among people, between people and objects in the spaces of kiosks, rooms, buildings, streets andother public areas. Central to the understanding of interaction in all these levels are the physical and social“affordances” that technology can potentially enable.Since that Norman (1988) appropriated the concept of affordance from Gibson’s (1979) definition andapplied it to the design of products and technologies, this concept has been transformed and has fed a debateabout its meaning and use. This discussion originated a number of publications that explore the differencesbetween approaches, such as McGrenere & Ho (2000) which compared Gibson’s and Norman’s concepts andexpanded it in a framework, and O’Neill (2008) which elucidated how Gibson’s affordance works, aiming atemphasizing what he considered some author’s misappropriation of the original definition.The purpose of this paper is not to create a new comparison, but to shed light on how this term has beentransformed in keeping with the evolution in the way the human has been related to technology and thechanges in the HCI field. It is organized as follows: Section 2 presents a panorama of HCI evolution throughthe three paradigms and relates it to the transformations of the concept of affordance. Section 3 discusses fourdifferent categories of affordance considered in an observational study, described in Section 4. Discussion onresults is presented in Section 5, and, Section 6 concludes and points out future works.183