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ISBN: 978-972-8939-25-0 © 2010 IADIS2. A PANORAMA OF HCI EVOLUTIONThe HCI history has been reviewed through three main dominant paradigms built in continuous transitions,motivated by the technology available at the time, the influence from related science fields and models andtheories used to explain those realities.The relation between humans and computers started in the 60’s, within the scenario provided bymainframes. As the computer graphics emerged, some usability requirements were recognized as necessaryto improve the relationship of the computer with its many users (Harper et al., 2008). This technical scenariohad hardly changed in the 80’s, when the Personal Computer was launched, bringing to HCI aspects ofengineering associated with human factors. All this period constituted what Harrison et al. (2007) named theHCI 1 st paradigm, whose main goal was to optimize the fit between humans and machines, developingpragmatic solutions in coupling them.In the 90’s, computer networks and mobility were part of the technological domain, moving the focus togroups working together, which constituted the focus of a 2 nd paradigm. “Theory focused on work settingsand interaction within well-established communities of practice. Situated action, distributed cognition andactivity theory were important sources of theoretical reflection, and concepts like context came into focus ofthe analysis and design of HCI. Rigid guidelines, formal methods, and systematic testing were mostlyabandoned for proactive methods such as a variety of participatory design workshops, prototyping andcontextual inquiries.” (Bødker, 2006).Many questions related to the 2 nd paradigm, as well as its models and theories are still current issues inthe HCI field, as Bødker (2006) argues, while a 3 rd paradigm started to emerge: “technology spreads fromthe workplace to our homes and everyday life and culture.” (Harper et al., 2008).Current phenomena related to the use of technology are transforming the society: the hyper-connectivity –by keeping people closer to the others, it may mobilize crowds in a global way; the techno-dependency inany kind of activity; the desire to be in touch and capture information about everything; and the creativeengagement, building a society where everybody can be a content producer. People are increasinglyappropriating new digital tools, including illiterate and impaired users (Harper et. al, 2008).Towards 2020, the technology will also be changing, according to ITEA (2009): proliferation ofembedding technology in multiple devices; sensors as input; 3D or 4D as output; augmented (AR) and virtualreality (VR) applications; and physical machines sometimes replacing humans in interaction and decisionmaking. Some consequences of these changes are that “new elements of human life will be included in thehuman-computer interactions such as culture, emotion and experience.” (Bødker, 2006) (Harrison et al.,2007). Emotions are going to be part of context or input (ITEA, 2009); meaning is already constructedcollaboratively and interaction is influenced or perhaps even constructed by its varying physical and socialsituations (Harrison et al., 2007).In a different scientific research scenario, by the end of the 70’s, the concept of affordance was created byGibson (1979), in his ecological theory of perception. Once it was applied to HCI, it has been transformedfollowing the main trends represented by the three paradigms. Nowadays, the concept of affordance has beenapplied to other domains such as cognitive robotics, supporting strategies when robots are interacting withobjects (Tekkotsu, 2010). This evolution in the concept is represented in Table 1, which summarizes the mainchanges in HCI field from the 70’s to what has been expected by the year of 2020 in terms of technologyavailable, construction of meaning, predominant influence from other fields, the main question that directsHCI researches, predominant models and theories.Starting from the original definition of affordance, the next section describes some of the main authors’views of the concept to improve our understanding on the relationship between humans and computers.3. TRANSFORMATIONS ON THE AFFORDANCE DEFINITIONGibson (1979) defined the concept of affordances in the ecological context to mean “[…] a direct result ofthe relationship between the objective physical properties of the environment and the subjective experience ofthe perceiving actor within that environment”. What we usually pay attention to is what an object affords us.Based upon Gestalt theories, Gibson states that affordances are perceived with no cognitive processing, and itis the highlight of his definition when comparing it to derived approaches.184