Reading: R. Jordon Crouser and Remco Chang. 2012. An Affordance-Based Framework for Human Computation and Human-Computer Collaboration. IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics 18, 12: 2859–2868. https://doi.org/10.1109/TVCG.2012.195
This paper is creating a summary of data visualization innovations as well as more general human computer collaboration tools for interpreting and making conclusions for data. The goal of the paper is to create a common language by which to categorize these tools and thereby provide a way of comparing the tools and understanding exactly what is needed for a particular situation rather than relying on just researcher intuition. They set up a framework in terms of affordances, what a human or computer can find opportunity and are capable of doing to do given the environment. By framing things in terms of affordances, we are able to identify how a human and/or computer can contribute to the goal of a given task, as well as be able to frame a system in comparison to other systems in terms of their affordances.
The idea of categorizing human-computer collaborations in terms of affordances is certainly an interesting and intuitive idea. Framing the characteristics of the different tools and software we use in these terms is a useful way of looking at things. However, as useful as the framework is, having read a little bit about function allocation, I don’t see how hugely different affordances are from function allocation. They both seem to be saying the same thing, in my view. The list of affordances is a bit more comprehensive than the Fitts HABA-MABA list. However, they both seem to be conveying the same information. Perhaps I do not have the necessary width of knowledge to see the difference, but the paper doesn’t make any convincing argument that is easy for an outsider to this field to understand.
Questions for discussion:
- How effective of a system is affordances? What use is it actually able to provide besides being one more set of standards? (relevant xkcd: https://m.xkcd.com/927/)
- There is a seemingly clear separation between human and machine affordances. But human adaptability seems to be third kind of affordance, a hybrid affordance where a machine action is used to spark human ingenuity. Does that seem like a valid or would you say that adaptability falls clearly in one of the two existing categories?
- Now that we have a language to talk about this stuff, can we now use this language, these different affordances, to combine together to create new applications? What would that look like? Or are we limited to just identifying an application by its affordances after its creation?
I do agree that, though the thoroughness of the of the given list seems comprehensive enough, it may seem it is another standard of standards. Though I may be biased, I have heard stories and statistics of research that is un-reproducable and unused. This idea I would say it might be akin to the multitude of programming languages that are relatively unheard of (such as Crystal and J), but a better representation of it is the growing markup language specification (xml, json, yaml, zaml, toml, go-spec, …). There might have been a reason for it’s justification but it the lack of unity around the standard weakens it’s overall impact