Affordance-Derived Declarative Interaction Models for Context Adaptation

Automatically adapting an interactive application to its use context is highly dependent on the existence of a declarative model. The Model-Based User Interface Development research made important progress in fully declarative specifications on interactive applications. However, the Abstract User Interface declarative models, such as task-based or communication-based models, are unfamiliar to designers and developers. This paper presents early explorations into a research program aimed at achieving fully declarative interactive applications: outlining a static concrete user interface and deriving the interaction from its affordances. The basic assumption is that for a well-designed user interface, the UI function can be derived from its form through affordance mechanisms. As the static aspects like the UI initial form are already being described declaratively in industrial practice, fully declarative interactive applications would result from the new research program.