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Affording Mechanisms: An Integrated View of Coordination and Knowledge Management

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Abstract

In this paper we question the separation between technologies that support information and handle the ordered flow of work and technologies that support knowledge management. On the basis of observational studies and initiatives of participatory prototype design that we performed in the hospital domain and other cooperative work settings, the paper proposes a unified view of these high-level functionalities through the notion of Affording Mechanism. In order to clarify the implications for design, the paper discusses the relationships between knowledge and representations; the role of artifacts that are used in activities where knowledge is allegedly “produced, shared and consumed”; and finally the notion of affordance and its dynamics. In very general terms, an AM consists of an artifact and of dynamic relationships between the context of use and the artifact’s affordances, expressed in terms of simple if-then constructs. The affordances conveyed through and by the artifact are modulated in order to evoke a “positive” reaction in the actors who use these augmented artifacts and to support knowledgeable behaviors apt to the situation. Moreover, the paper illustrates a prototypical technology through examples derived from the studies mentioned above, and discusses the kind of support this application provides in the light of an unusual interpretation of what it might mean to “manage” knowledge through computer-based technology.

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Notes

  1. A Coordination Mechanism encompasses a protocol and a symbolic artifact. The protocol explicitly specifies both institutional (i.e., procedure-based) and conventional uses of the artifact and how this stipulates and mediates the articulation of activities. The artifact, through a standardized format, conveys the protocol in that it provides affordances and constraints to articulation work.

  2. In order to distinguish this acronym from the more popular standing for Application Programming Interface, we propose to pronounce it ‘uh-pi’.

  3. The expression ‘knowledge evoking information’ will not sound new for social psychology scholars. In this field, a KEI is any information in presence of which specific knowledge is more likely to be used than in its absence (cf. (Higgins 1996), p. 135). More recently, and independently of our research, computer-based ways to evoke knowledge and group awareness are under investigation in the field of educational psychology (see, e.g. (Engelmann et al. 2010)).

  4. Very succinctly here we can just recall that, for Gibson the term affordance indicates a property of the environment that affords(i.e., offers) opportunities for potential action to receptive individuals. As rightly noted also by Turner ((Turner 2005), p. 789) the term was intended to denote a dynamic relation between an organism and its environment and therefore affordances were not conceived as static properties of the world, but rather as properties that are both “objective and subjective” ((Gibson 1979), p. 129) and “that lay solely in our interaction with the world” ((Stephen and Ray 2005), p. 64). On the other hand, Norman’s reformulation of the term affordance sees it as a perceived property of an artifact that “tells the user what actions can be performed on [it] and, to some extent, how to do them” ((Norman 1988), p. 9) in virtue of some mapping between the tool and its function, i.e., the afforded action. In this slightly different meaning, affordances are not taken as something that “speak” by themselves but that rather “suggest the range of possibilities” ((Norman 1988), p. 14) by “providing strong clues to the [artifact’s] operations” ((Norman 1988), p. 9). Therefore, as a design-oriented construct, affordances (and their dual counterparts, constraints) can be seen as versatile means to guide and instruct users in a twofold manner: to either invite users to particular actions or usages of the affording tool or to limit and restrict other uses (Constantine and Lockwood 2002).

  5. The Apgar score is a widely adopted method to summarily assess the health conditions of newborn children immediately after their birth.

  6. Wittgenstein, on the final page of his Tractatus, said that all what he had written so far could rightly seem senseless or better yet just a mere means to see what he really meant. As such, he invited his readers to be willing to discard his words in order to see the world rightly or, as he put it, be willing to throw away the ladder after having climbed up on it. A similar metaphor, that of scaffolding, has been proposed by (Clark 1998) and (Orlikowski 2006) to stress the provisionality and instrumental nature of any support of human knowledge.

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Acknowledgments

The work presented in this paper has been partially supported by the Italian fund F.A.R. 2010. The authors would like to thank the management and personnel of the Neonatal Intensive Care Units of the Alessandro Manzoni hospital of Lecco and of the Giovanni Fornaroli hospital of Magenta for their kind collaboration and precious time.

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    Federico Cabitza & Carla Simone

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Correspondence to Federico Cabitza.

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Cabitza, F., Simone, C. Affording Mechanisms: An Integrated View of Coordination and Knowledge Management. Comput Supported Coop Work 21, 227–260 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-011-9153-z

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