Title: Affordance-Based Product Architecture

Abstract
Companies focusing on technical innovations are faced with products that are increasingly more complex and place higher demands on users' abilities to understand and operate them. Resources are lost with products that do not match user requirements. At the same time, developers have limited methods to integrate user requirements information into multiple phases of product development. This dissertation examines how to design user-product relationships into the core of a product's architecture based on the information from function analysis and user studies. Introduced is a Function-Task-Interaction methodology that identifies, represents and quantifies these relationships, and is supported by three case studies and a information system. The methodology presented is based on the concept of affordances and received the XEROX-ASME Award during the 2005 Design Theory and Methodology Conference organized by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.

Research Areas
Product architecture, Design Relationships, Function, Task, Affordance, Requirements, Product Development, Product Semantics, Interface Design, Innovation.

Revised dissertation available at Amazon.com (click on left link)