Glossary
Searchable terminology from accessibility, web standards, and related fields.
15 results found in Design Theory.
- Access as Friction
- A disability-studies framing, articulated by Jackson, Haagaard, and Williams, that reframes accessibility work as productive friction rather than seamless accommodation. Rather than smoothing every in…
- COM-B Model (COM-B, Capability Opportunity Motivation Behaviour Model)
- A behaviour-change framework proposed by Michie, van Stralen, and West (2011) that identifies three necessary conditions for behaviour to occur: Capability (physical and psychological ability, includi…
- Designing with Friction (Friction by Design)
- An HCI design stance, associated with Matthias Korn and Amy Voida, that argues for deliberately introducing friction into interactive systems to surface politics, provoke reflection, and enable democr…
- Ergonomics (Human factors engineering)
- The scientific discipline concerned with understanding interactions between humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data, and methods to design in or…
- Execution Gap (Gulf of Execution)
- From Don Norman's model of human-computer interaction, the distance between a user's goals and the physical actions required to achieve them using a given system. A system with a wide execution gap fo…
- Feminist HCI
- An approach to human-computer interaction research and design articulated by Shaowen Bardzell that brings feminist theory, values, and methods into HCI practice. Feminist HCI foregrounds pluralism, em…
- Flourishing (Developmental Flourishing, Human Flourishing)
- An orientation in design and HCI that measures success not by task completion or outcome equivalence but by the extent to which a system supports individuals' subjective well-being, personal significa…
- Playful Interaction (Playful design)
- A design stance that treats play — voluntary, intrinsically motivated, rule-structured activity — as a core property of interactive systems rather than a surface layer of rewards or points. Playful in…
- Positive Computing (Positive Technology)
- A design approach articulated by Rafael Calvo and Dorian Peters (2014) and extended by Riva, Gaggioli and colleagues that intentionally orients information and communication technology toward supporti…
- Positive Design (Design for Subjective Well-Being)
- A design framework, articulated by Desmet and Pohlmeyer, that explicitly targets human flourishing by attending to three components of subjective well-being: pleasure (positive affect in the moment), …
- Posthumanism (Posthumanist Design, More-than-Human Design)
- A theoretical orientation in design and HCI that decenters the human as the sole agent of value and instead considers nonhuman animals, plants, ecosystems, and even technological artifacts as particip…
- Relational Sovereignty
- A framework proposed by Jang, Carrington and Begel (2026) as a new goal (telos) for socially assistive technology, defined as the recognised authority of a disabled person to choose their relational m…
- Somaesthetics
- Somaesthetics is a philosophical discipline, developed by Richard Shusterman, that treats the living, sentient, purposive body (the soma) as both a locus of aesthetic appreciation and a medium of crea…
- Stage-Based Model (Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics)
- A model of personal-informatics use, introduced by Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi (2010), describing how people move through five stages of self-tracking: preparation (deciding to track), collec…
- World-Making (Worldmaking)
- World-making, drawing on Nelson Goodman's 'Ways of Worldmaking' and extended in disability scholarship by Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, refers to the active construction of shared social worlds throug…