Despite the importance of design to engineering, industry, and the overall economy, design science remains a young and underdeveloped field. Current practitioners, researchers, and students of design are left to navigate a patchwork of methods addressing various phases of design without a unifying theoretical framework. In this book the theory of affordances (a concept borrowed from perceptual psychology) is further developed and generalized to apply to engineering situations. An affordance describes the potential behavior of a system consisting of subsystems such as users and artifacts....