The interplay between sensory-motor and intentional affordances

In Interaction Design affordance is so far the most well known concept coming from the embodied view of cognition. Yet it is hard to disagree that notwithstanding the effort to make of affordances a heuristic resource in the design process, affordances have been used post-hoc or as exploitation of existing human dispositions. However affordances have mostly been considered in contest of dyadic relationship between humans and objects/layouts. We introduce the complementary concept of intentional affordances, originally proposed by Michael Tomasello, and trough examples coming from experimental evidence maintain that a key issue for designing artifacts that can smoothly be introduced in the everyday of children for mediating their activities is the interplay between sensory-motor and intentional affordances. This view raises a class of new questions that could contribute to exploit the theoretical approach of embodied cognition in the design of digital artifacts.