Recently, the concept of affordance has been increasingly interested in the design community because it describes the relationship between human users and designed products well. It was first introduced by the perceptual psychologist James Gibson: “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” Gibson explained that the affordance of something doesn’t depend on interpretation or interaction. The object offers what it does because of what it is. One way of improving the product is to aim at maximizing all of its affordances. However, the products can have multiple affordances and many of them may not be intended by the designer. For example, skaters turn handrails in parks into elevated tracks, and phone books are often used as doorstops. None of these were the intended or manifest function of the artifact, but people who interact with the objects reveal their latent functions through acts of creativity, adaptation, and resistance. In The Design of Everyday Things, Don Norman defines affordance as the “perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used.” This means there is “perceived affordance” as what people understand to be the potential use of the object. To improve the communication between users and the products, the designer should make more specific affordances by intentionally embedding cues for people who use the object than just maximize the quality of affordances. In the humanistic study of design, cultures are usually determined by time and place, but objects tend to get lost in the cultural perspectives that frame them. There is still a conversation to take place between social scientists and humanists on the question of design and its users.
Bilblography:
Almquist, Julka, and Julia Lupton. “Affording Meaning: Design-Oriented Research from the Humanities and Social Sciences.” Design Issues, vol. 26, no. 1, 2010, pp. 3–14. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20627838. Accessed 14 Sept. 2020.
Kannengiesser, Udo, and John S. Gero. “A Process Framework of Affordances in Design.” Design Issues, vol. 28, no. 1, 2012, pp. 50–62., www.jstor.org/stable/41427809. Accessed 14 Sept. 2020.
“Maximizing the Four Affordances.” Inventing the Medium: Principles of Interaction Design as a Cultural Practice, by Janet H. Murray, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts; London, England, 2012, pp. 87–104. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt5hhjgg.8. Accessed 14 Sept. 2020.
J. J. Gibson, The Theory of Affordances, in R. E. Shaw and J. Bransford (eds) Perceiving, Acting and Knowing, (Hillsdale, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1977), 67-82. J. J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1979).
Donald Norman. Design of Everyday Things {New York: Basic Books, 2002, c.1988), 9.
I like the definition in the last part. Defining the target group is essential for designers in the design process. Establishing some “rules” for users can provide users with a simpler and more enjoyable use process.