ABSTRACT
The psychologist Donald Norman brought Gibson’s concept of affordance to the design audience. Semiotics can provide designers with knowledge for the design of interactive products, by showing how “universal” product elements allow for both subjective and objective interpretations of meaning. In the world of product design, natural responses have been capitalized upon in the form of biomimetic, lifelike, anthropomorphic, and zoomorphic product forms and product behaviors. Artists and designers have historically been interested in lifelike form and behavior in three-dimensional artifacts. Theories of natural responses to products and artifacts in the environment offer new ways to understand and categorize action and interaction with designed products. Beyond the concepts of familiarity and liking, they will contribute to new design knowledge about knowledge-for-action. Designers try to understand and predict what effect a new product will have on the individual and society: how it changes the experience of being in the world.
