User Interface Affordances in a Planning Representation

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Abstract
This article shows how the concept of affordance in the user interface fits into a well-understood artificial intelligence (AI) model of acting in an environment. In this model AI planning research is used to interpret affordances in terms of the costs associated with the generation and execution of operators in a plan. This article motivates the approach with a brief survey of the affordance literature and its connections to the planning literature and then explores its implications through examples of common user interface mechanisms described in affordances terms. Despite its simplicity, the modeling approach ties together several different threads of practical and theoretical work on affordance into a single conceptual framework.