The ABC (Affordance-Bias-Cognition) Reasoning of Product-Use Interaction: A Text Mining Approach

The main approaches to study the cognitive aspects of product-use interaction involve many theoretical models that map the match or mismatch among the users' and designers' knowledge, beliefs, and expectations into positive interactions (affordances, alternative uses) or negative interactions (misuse and failure). However, these assumptions have only been approached theoretically and hardly find empirical consensus in Engineering Design. For this reason, the aim of this paper is to show how it is possible to apply Text Mining to empirically demonstrate a theoretical model developed to interpret the cognitive aspects of product-use interaction. We approached this study by analyzing the textual content of patents to empirically demonstrate the reasoning of the following cognitive aspects: affordances, bad design, and bias. In particular, we developed a framework called Affordance-Bias-Cognition (ABC) reasoning that aims at demonstrating that when humans (designers or users) approach objects, they follow a well-defined pattern of cognitive activities (or phases): cause, perception, interpretation, manipulation, and check. Furthermore, we demonstrate that affordances, bad design, and bias follow the same cognitive processes, and that differs only because users and designers, acting like humans, have misconceptions that lead to positive and negative interactions.