Eliciting desired experiences: Design affordances to communicate users’ latent aspirations of the built environment

Affordances are cues to the actual and possible actions in the environment influenced by our experiences (Gibson, 1979, 2014). Harry Heft explains affordances as ‘perceptible properties of the environment that have functional significance for an individual’ (Heft, 2010, p.18). The significant elements of the environment framed by the context of a person’s experiences give insights into how the environment is perceived (Heft, 2010). Heft describes the concept of affordances as meanings that exist from a relationship perspective between the perceiver and the features of the environment (Heft, 2010) and ‘meaningful things can take hold of us’ (Heft, 2010, p.25).

keywords: design affordances; architectural design

• with Damian Rogers (lead), Anita Kocsis
• year: May 2023 – January 2024
• for: 7 Experiences Summit 2023 
• download: Article