Affora: A Design System for Agent-Friendly Interfaces

As AI systems evolve from single agents to multi-agent architectures, a critical design dimension has been overlooked: how the social identity of individual agents shapes human behavior within the collaboration. This paper introduces the Agentic Social Affordance Framework (ASAF), a theoretical framework extending Social Affordance theory to multi-agent AI systems. We propose that agent identity design functions as a collaboration interface--structuring how users perceive and engage with each agent, and thereby influencing Human-Agent collaboration outcomes. ASAF adopts the analytical separability of the social affordance layer and the engineering orchestration layer as a framing assumption--an organizing distinction that structures design analysis--rather than a testable claim about effect-independence. ASAF comprises three mechanisms: Identity Signaling, Behavioral Priming, and Collaborative Governance, and specifies their boundary conditions through a four-tier Identity Signal Fidelity Spectrum and an individual-difference moderating variable (anthropomorphizing vs. instrumentalizing cognitive style). We situate ASAF relative to affordance theory (Hutchby, 2001), the CASA paradigm (Gambino et al., 2020), and classical multi-agent systems research (Wooldridge & Jennings, 1995), identifying a directional reversal: where classical MAS used roles, norms, and coordination to constrain autonomous agents, ASAF applies the same organizational vocabulary to structure the cognition and oversight of human operators who remain in the loop. ASAF positions social affordance design as a first-class design responsibility that engineering orchestration cannot subsume. We outline directions for empirical validation, including a factorial design characterizing the empirical interaction surface between the social affordance and engineering orchestration layers.

AI agents are rapidly evolving into autonomous systems capable of sustained interaction, tool use, and long-term collaboration. Yet their real-world adoption remains limited, suggesting that the key barrier lies not only in technical capability but also in a lack of design knowledge for successful human-agent interaction. This position paper argues that AI agents should not be solely evaluated or deployed based on autonomous task capability alone; because agents interact with, adapt to, influence, and sometimes fail humans, human-agent interaction must be treated as a core design and evaluation target for agentic AI. We present 14 design principles that articulate the ideal human-agent relationship across four interaction stages: initially, during interaction, over time, and when things go wrong. We use these principles to evaluate nine agent systems to illustrate that these design principles can provide actionable guidance for AI design teams to systematically design and evaluate agents that are usable, trustworthy, and effective in real-world interactive settings.

Assistive agents for Blind and Visually Impaired (BVI) users require accessibility alignment as a first-class design objective. Despite rapid progress in agentic AI, most systems are designed and evaluated under assumptions of sighted interaction, low-cost verification, and tolerable trial-and-error, leading to systematic failures in assistive scenarios that cannot be resolved by model scaling or post-hoc interface adaptations alone. Drawing on an analysis of 778 assistance task instances from prior work, we show that current agentic AI remain prone to failure in assistive scenarios due to mismatches between sighted-user design assumptions and the verification, risk, and interaction constraints faced by BVI users. We argue that accessibility should be treated as an alignment problem rather than a peripheral usability concern. To this end, we introduce accessibility alignment and propose a lifecycle-oriented design pipeline for accessibility-aligned assistive agents, spanning user research, system design, deployment and post-deployment iteration. We conclude that BVI-centered assistive tasks provide a critical stress test for agentic AI and motivate a broader shift toward inclusive agent design.