Title: Human affordance

Authors: Masayuki Ihara, Minoru Kobayashi, Yoshinori Sakai

Addresses: Research and Development Department, Core Technology and Program Management Division, NTT Comware Corporation, 1–6 Nakase, Mihama-ku, Chiba, 261–0023 Japan. ' NTT Cyber Solutions Laboratories, NTT Corporation, 1–1 Hikari-no-oka, Yokosuka, 239–0847 Japan. ' Department of Communications and Integrated Systems, Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, 2–12–1 Ookayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo, 152–8550 Japan

Abstract: Our final goal is to utilise a cognition viewpoint for the engineering of a better design of human communication tools. In this paper, we extend the concept of affordance to cover human-to-human communication and propose the novel concept of |human affordance|, which is afforded from humans, not artefacts. As one possible utilisation of the concept, we introduce the example of affordance in evaluating the strength of agreement/disagreement phrases. In text-based communication, it is important for mutual understanding to effectively afford information about how a person feels about the text itself. This paper presents experimental results on over/underestimation in understanding the strength of agreement/disagreement in text-based communication. The human affordance identified in typical agreement/disagreement phrases is analysed in order to explore how to better augment human affordance in text-based communication.

Keywords: human affordance; agreement; disagreement; overestimation; underestimation; text-based communication; affordance augmentation; human-to-human communication.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWBC.2009.023968

International Journal of Web Based Communities, 2009 Vol.5 No.2, pp.255 - 272

Published online: 22 Mar 2009 *

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