Applying Affordance and ISM to Optimize Design of Elder Aids Keywords: Walker, Affordance, Interpretive structural model (ISM), Analytic Hierarchical Process (AHP), Multivariate Analysis Generally speaking, for both institutional designers and industrial designers, the execution of design is usually restricted to the designer’s knowledge and experience. This leads to low cognition towards products regarding appearance and function for users. Moreover, wrong cognition against the products occurred under complex product combination (Gibson, 1979). In the recent years, Affordance theory emerged, which was first introduced by American cognitive psychologist. James Gibson adopted ecological psychology’s concept to observe all the elements in the environment. The combination of physical attributes and organism were able to maintain a logical correspondence (Jones, 2003). In 1988, Donald Norman applied Affordance to design, which enabled direct product performance’s response from the users in terms of perception and action. In design, it became an important connection between products and users (Norman, 1990). According to definitions from different
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scholars, the study defined Affordance as “visible operation”. Authors take the walkers which elders often use
Chih-Huang Yen
to do research and dismantle and Improvement. Using the design characteristics of Affordance, it can make the redesign walkers more intuitive, no more language or writing to explain. The appearance of redesign walkers can be used by normal person, elders, and foreign care workers easily, reducing human, material and other
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costs. And may also break the barriers of borders, it would make worldwide people study and perform opera-
Design method & concept
tions easily and reduce unnecessary errors. Fig. 1 presented the procedure of research. There are 4 stages:
The first stage was to explore users’ need from the online market. Expert chose the optimal and representa
for Elder Aids
tive products. Actual operation and questionnaire brought out the problems of wheeled walker and the inconvenience in reality.
In the second stage, Affordance design frame was established. Through the collecting of literature in Affor-
Supervisor
dance to compact elements accord with Affordance. Then, Multivariate Analysis was used to calculate and
Prof. Shih-Wen Hsiao
generate the revised design frame of the wheeled walker in this study.
The third stage was to establish an optimal model. Elements of the walker were coded and underwent ISM algorithm. Thus both the optimal model and cluster relationship of the correspondent elements will be obtained. The model was revised using the concept Affordance defined by the second stage for frame design. Moreover, morphological chart was used to develop shapes and several design concepts that agreed with Affordance for the future research.
The fourth stage was the concept evaluation of Affordance and sampling. Through the construction of evaluation model, PUGH method and AHP were applied to the design obtained from stage three and obtained the optimal design concept. After that, 1:1 model proofing was conducted and verification was done. yr1
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Figure 1
REFERENCES • Gibson, J. J. 1977. The theory of affordances, InR. E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing. Hillsdale, NJ; Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. • Jones, K. 2003. What Is an Affordance? Ecological Psychology, Vol.15, No.2, pp.107-114. • Norman, D.A. 1999. Affordance, Conventions, and Design, Interaction, May- June, pp.38-42.