An Experimental Study on Cultural Affordances: a Study on Procedure of Percieving Artifacts from Another Culture with Applications for Industrial Design

This book is one of the steps that are expected to bridge an existing gap in design practice: An existing distance between design trends which are more affected by culture and those practices which are more concentrated on physical interaction with the products, meaning designing highly interactive products. Regarding this direction , the phenomenon of cultural affordance comes out : We need to study how element of culture can manipulate the process of perceiving direct information which exists in the objects and environment , namely affordances. Activity theory is used as our framework. During this study, we compare participants of Iran and Italy with each other and we try to explore cultural context affecting the information which exists in objects in immediate level of perception, meaning affordances. The results of the experiments give us useful hints about the effect of culture on perceiving affordances, the procedure of such an information transition and possible tools which could facilitate detecting cultural affordances. This book is an edited version of the author's thesis as presented in 2008,in Politecnico di Milano, Italy.