Use of Affordance in Design Science Research: A Systematic Literature Review and Research Agenda

Design Science Research (DSR) focuses on creating artefacts to solve real-world problems and shares some common objectives with affordance for creating designs that are not only visually aesthetic but also user-friendly and practical. However, varying interpretations of affordance and lack of guidelines for its use with DSR have led to inconsistent findings and hindered the ability to draw meaningful conclusions. Considering the dearth of existing studies, we conducted a systematic literature review using the ‘PRISMA’ method to investigate trends, identify themes, gaps, and determine research agendas of relevant studies that use affordance in DSR. We used four popular academic databases, and 21 research articles were finally selected through comprehensive screening criteria. The review identifies the findings, results and contributions that are helpful to researchers and practitioners through descriptive and thematic analysis using NVivo. It highlights the need for more interdisciplinary and cross-domain research to integrate affordance in DSR.