Affordances in interior design: A case study of affordances in interior design of conference room using enhanced function and task interaction

Interior design of space is somewhat different from product design in view of followings: the space should afford the multiple users at the same time and afford appropriate interactions with human and objects which exist inside the space. This paper presents a case study of interior design of a conference room based on affordance concept. We analyzed all of users' tasks in a conference room based on the human activities that are divided into human-object and human-human interactions. Function decomposition of an every object in conference room was conducted. The concept of a high-level function is used such as "configure the space" to satisfy the given condition of the number of humans, the types of conference, and so forth. The Function-Task Interaction (FTI) method was enhanced to analyze the interactions between functions and user tasks. Many low-level affordances were extracted, and high-level affordances such as enter/exitability, prepare-ability, present-ability, discuss-ability and conclude-ability were also extracted by grouping low-level affordances in the enhanced FTI matrix. In addition, the benchmarking simulation was conducted for several existing conference rooms and the results confirmed that the extracted affordances can be used for checklist and also for good guidance on interior design process.