The design of tea cups and a teapot suggest their respective functionsA door knob shaped to reflect how it is used, an example of perceptible affordanceAffordance is one of several design principles used when designing graphical user interfaces.
In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.
American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems,[1] and it occurs in many of his earlier essays.[2] His best-known definition is from his 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.[3]
Gibson developed the concept of affordance over many years, culminating in his final book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception[4] in 1979. He defined an affordance as what the environment provides or furnishes the animal. Notably, Gibson compares an affordance with an ecological niche emphasizing the way niches characterize how an animal lives in its environment.
The key to understanding affordance is that it is relational and characterizes the suitability of the environment to the observer, and so, depends on their current intentions and their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises 1 metre (3ft) high does not afford climbing to the crawling infant, yet might provide rest to a tired adult or the opportunity to move to another floor for an adult who wished to reach an alternative destination. This notion of intention/needs is critical to an understanding of affordance, as it explains how the same aspect of the environment can provide different affordances to different people, and even to the same individual at another point in time. As Gibson puts it, “Needs control the perception of affordances (selective attention) and also initiate acts.”[5]
Affordances were further studied by Eleanor J. Gibson, wife of James J. Gibson, who created her theory of perceptual learning around this concept. Her book, An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development, explores affordances further.
Gibson's is the prevalent definition in cognitive psychology. According to Gibson, humans tend to alter and modify their environment so as to change its affordances to better suit them. In his view, humans change the environment to make it easier to live in (even if making it harder for other animals to live in it): to keep warm, to see at night, to rear children, and to move around. This tendency to change the environment is natural to humans, and Gibson argues that it is a mistake to treat the social world apart from the material world or the tools apart from the natural environment. He points out that manufacturing was originally done by hand as a kind of manipulation. Gibson argues that learning to perceive an affordance is an essential part of socialization.
The theory of affordances introduces a "value-rich ecological object".[4] Affordances cannot be described within the value-neutral language of physics, but rather introduces notions of benefits and injuries to someone. An affordance captures this beneficial/injurious aspect of objects and relates them to the animal for whom they are well/ill-suited. During childhood development, a child learns to perceive not only the affordances for the self, but also how those same objects furnish similar affordances to another. A child can be introduced to the conventional meaning of an object by manipulating which objects command attention and demonstrating how to use the object through performing its central function.[6] By learning how to use an artifact, a child “enters into the shared practices of society” as when they learn to use a toilet or brush their teeth.[6] And so, by learning the affordances, or conventional meaning of an artifact, children learn the artifact's social world and further, become a member of that world.
Anderson, Yamagishi and Karavia (2002) found that merely looking at an object primes the human brain to perform the action the object affords.[7]
As perceived action possibilities
In 1988, Donald Norman appropriated the term affordances in the context of Human–Computer Interaction to refer to just those action possibilities that are readily perceivable by an actor. This new definition of "action possibilities" has now become synonymous with Gibson's work, although Gibson himself never made any reference to action possibilities in any of his writing.[8] Through Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things,[9] this interpretation was popularized within the fields of HCI, interaction design, and user-centered design. It makes the concept dependent not only on the physical capabilities of an actor, but also on their goals, beliefs, and past experiences. If an actor steps into a room containing an armchair and a softball, Gibson's original definition of affordances allows that the actor may throw the chair and sit on the ball, because this is objectively possible. Norman's definition of (perceived) affordances captures the likelihood that the actor will sit on the armchair and throw the softball. Effectively, Norman's affordances "suggest" how an object may be interacted with. For example, the size, shape, and weight of a softball make it perfect for throwing by humans, and it matches their past experience with similar objects, as does the shape and perceptible function of an armchair for sitting. The focus on perceived affordances is much more pertinent to practical design problems [why?], which may explain its widespread adoption.
Norman later explained that this restriction of the term's meaning had been unintended, and in his 2013 update of The Design of Everyday Things, he added the concept "signifiers". In the digital age, designers were learning how to indicate what actions were possible on a smartphone's touchscreen, which didn't have the physical properties that Norman intended to describe when he used the word "affordances".
Designers needed a word to describe what they were doing, so they chose affordance. What alternative did they have? I decided to provide a better answer: signifiers. Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where the action should take place. We need both.[10]
However, the definition from his original book has been widely adopted in HCI and interaction design, and both meanings are now commonly used in these fields.
Following Norman's adaptation of the concept, affordance has seen a further shift in meaning where it is used as an uncountable noun, referring to the easy discoverability of an object or system's action possibilities, as in "this button has good affordance".[11] This in turn has given rise to use of the verb afford – from which Gibson's original term was derived – that is not consistent with its dictionary definition (to provide or make available): designers and those in the field of HCI often use afford as meaning "to suggest" or "to invite".[12]
The different interpretations of affordances, although closely related, can be a source of confusion in writing and conversation if the intended meaning is not made explicit and if the word is not used consistently. Even authoritative textbooks can be inconsistent in their use of the term.[11][12]
When affordances are used to describe information and communications technology (ICT) an analogy is created with everyday objects with their attendant features and functions.[13] Yet, ICT's features and functions derive from the product classifications of its developers and designers. This approach emphasizes an artifact’s convention to be wholly located in how it was designed to be used. In contrast, affordance theory draws attention to the fit of the technology to the activity of the user and so lends itself to studying how ICTs may be appropriated by users or even misused.[13] One meta-analysis reviewed the evidence from a number of surveys about the extent to which the Internet is transforming or enhancing community. The studies showed that the internet is used for connectivity locally as well as globally, although the nature of its use varies in different countries. It found that internet use is adding on to other forms of communication, rather than replacing them.[14]
Mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances
Jenny L. Davis introduced the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances in a 2016 article[15] and 2020 book.[16][17] The mechanisms and conditions framework shifts the orienting question from what technologies afford to how technologies afford, for whom and under what circumstances? This framework deals with the problem of binary application and presumed universal subjects in affordance analyses. The mechanisms of affordance indicate that technologies can variously request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow social action, conditioned on users' perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy in relation to the technological object.
This framework adds specificity to affordances, focuses attention on relationality, and centralizes the role of values, politics, and power in affordance theory. The mechanisms and conditions framework is a tool of both socio-technical analysis and socially aware design.
Three categories
William Gaver[18] divided affordances into three categories: perceptible, hidden, and false.
A false affordance is an apparent affordance that does not have any real function, meaning that the actor perceives possibilities for action that are nonexistent.[19] A good example of a false affordance is a placebo button.[20]
Affordance is said to be hidden when there are possibilities for action, but these are not perceived by the actor. For example, it is not apparent from looking at a shoe that it could be used to open a wine bottle, but such a feat is possible by placing the bottle into the shoe and tapping it repeatedly against a wall until the cork starts to be pushed out.[21]
Affordance is said to be perceptible when there is information available such that the actor perceives and can then act upon the existing affordance.
This means that, when affordances are perceptible, they offer a direct link between perception and action, and, when affordances are hidden or false, they can lead to mistakes and misunderstandings.
Affordance in robotics
Problems in robotics[22] indicate that affordance is not only a theoretical concept from psychology. In object grasping and manipulation, robots need to learn the affordance of objects in the environment, i.e., to learn from visual perception and experience (a) whether objects can be manipulated, (b) to learn how to grasp an object, and (c) to learn how to manipulate objects to reach a particular goal. As an example, the hammer can be grasped, in principle, with many hand poses and approach strategies, but there is a limited set of effective contact points and their associated optimal grip for performing the goal.
Fire safety
In the context of fire safety, affordances are the perceived and actual properties of objects and spaces that suggest how they can be used during an emergency. For instance, well-designed signage, clear pathways, and accessible exits afford quick evacuation. By understanding and applying affordance principles, designers can create environments that intuitively guide occupants towards safety, reduce evacuation time, and minimize the risk of injury during a fire. Incorporating affordance-based design in building layouts, emergency equipment placement, and evacuation procedures ensures that users can effectively interact with their surroundings under stressful conditions, ultimately improving overall fire safety. This theory has been applied to select best design for several evacuation systems using data from physical experiments and virtual reality experiments.[23][24][25]
Affordances in language education
Based on Gibson’s conceptualization of affordances as both the good and bad that the environment offers animals, affordances in language learning are both the opportunities and challenges that learners perceive of their environment when learning a language. Affordances, which are both learning opportunities or inhibitions, arise from the semiotic budget of the learning environment, which allows language to evolve. Positive affordances, or learning opportunities, are only effective in developing learner's language when they perceive and actively interact with their surroundings. Negative affordances, on the other hand, are crucial in exposing the learners’ weaknesses for teachers, and the learners themselves, to address their moment-to-moment needs in their learning process.[26]
Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system. Vision involves light striking the retina of the eye; smell is mediated by odor molecules; and hearing involves pressure waves.
Gestalt psychology, gestaltism, or configurationism is a school of psychology and a theory of perception that emphasises the processing of entire patterns and configurations, and not merely individual components. It emerged in the early twentieth century in Austria and Germany as a rejection of basic principles of Wilhelm Wundt's and Edward Titchener's elementalist and structuralist psychology.
A sensorium (/sɛnˈsɔːrɪəm/) is the apparatus of an organism's perception considered as a whole. It is the "seat of sensation" where it experiences, perceives and interprets the environments within which it lives. The term originally entered English from the Late Latin in the mid-17th century, from the stem sens- ("sense"). In earlier use it referred, in a broader sense, to the brain as the mind's organ. In medical, psychological, and physiological discourse it has come to refer to the total character of the unique and changing sensory environments perceived by individuals. These include the sensation, perception, and interpretation of information about the world around us by using faculties of the mind such as senses, phenomenal and psychological perception, cognition, and intelligence.
Situated cognition is a theory that posits that knowing is inseparable from doing by arguing that all knowledge is situated in activity bound to social, cultural and physical contexts.
James Jerome Gibson was an American psychologist and is considered to be one of the most important contributors to the field of visual perception. Gibson challenged the idea that the nervous system actively constructs conscious visual perception, and instead promoted ecological psychology, in which the mind directly perceives environmental stimuli without additional cognitive construction or processing. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked him as the 88th most cited psychologist of the 20th century, tied with John Garcia, David Rumelhart, Louis Leon Thurstone, Margaret Floy Washburn, and Robert S. Woodworth.
Ecological psychology ia the scientific study of the relationship between perception and action, grounded in a direct realist approach. This school of thought is heavily influenced by the writings of Roger Barker and James J. Gibson and stands in contrast to the mainstream explanations of perception offered by cognitive psychology. Ecological psychology is primarily concerned with the interconnectedness of perception, action and dynamical systems. A key principle in this field is the rejection of the traditional separation between perception and action, emphasizing instead that they are inseparable and interdependent.
Distributed cognition is an approach to cognitive science research that was developed by cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins during the 1990s.
Perceptual psychology is a subfield of cognitive psychology that concerns the conscious and unconscious innate aspects of the human cognitive system: perception.
Social affordance is a type of affordance. It refers to the properties of an object or environment that permit social actions. Social affordance is most often used in the context of a social technology such as Wiki, Chat and Facebook applications and refers to sociotechnical affordances. Social affordances emerge from the coupling between the behavioral and cognitive capacities of a given organism and the objective properties of its environment.
Motor control is the regulation of movements in organisms that possess a nervous system. Motor control includes conscious voluntary movements, subconscious muscle memory and involuntary reflexes, as well as instinctual taxis.
In perceptual psychology, a sensory cue is a statistic or signal that can be extracted from the sensory input by a perceiver, that indicates the state of some property of the world that the perceiver is interested in perceiving.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
Haptic perception means literally the ability "to grasp something", and is also known as stereognosis. Perception in this case is achieved through the active exploration of surfaces and objects by a moving subject, as opposed to passive contact by a static subject during tactile perception. Haptic perception involves the cutaneous receptors of touch, and proprioceptors that sense movement and body position. The inability for haptic perception is known as astereognosis.
Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations and motor representations are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation for both perception and action. More important, seeing an event activates the action associated with that event, and performing an action activates the associated perceptual event.
Human–computer interaction (HCI) is research in the design and the use of computer technology, which focuses on the interfaces between people (users) and computers. HCI researchers observe the ways humans interact with computers and design technologies that allow humans to interact with computers in novel ways. A device that allows interaction between human being and a computer is known as a "Human-computer Interface (HCI)".
Action-specific perception, or perception-action, is a psychological theory that people perceive their environment and events within it in terms of their ability to act. This theory hence suggests that a person's capability to carry out a particular task affects how they perceive the different aspects and methods involved in that task. For example, softball players who are hitting better see the ball as bigger. Tennis players see the ball as moving slower when they successfully return the ball. In the field of human-computer interaction, alterations in accuracy impact both the perception of size and time, while adjustments in movement speed impact the perception of distance. Furthermore, the perceiver's intention to act is also critical; while the perceiver's ability to perform the intended action influences perception, the perceiver's abilities for unintended actions have little or no effect on perception. Finally, the objective difficulty of the task appears to modulate size, distance, and time perception.
The Gibsonian ecological theory of development is a theory of development that was created by American psychologist Eleanor J. Gibson during the 1960s and 1970s. Gibson emphasized the importance of environment and context in learning and, together with husband and fellow psychologist James J. Gibson, argued that perception was crucial as it allowed humans to adapt to their environments. Gibson stated that "children learn to detect information that specifies objects, events, and layouts in the world that they can use for their daily activities". Thus, humans learn out of necessity. Children are information "hunter–gatherers", gathering information in order to survive and navigate in the world.
Active perception is the selecting of behaviors to increase information from the flow of data those behaviors produce in a particular environment. In other words, to understand the world, we move around and explore it—sampling the world through our senses to construct an understanding (perception) of the environment on the basis of that behavior (action). Within the construct of active perception, interpretation of sensory data is inherently inseparable from the behaviors required to capture that data. Action and perception are tightly coupled. This has been developed most comprehensively with respect to vision where an agent changes position to improve the view of a specific object, or where an agent uses movement to perceive the environment.
The ambient optic array is the structured arrangement of light with respect to a point of observation. American psychologist James J. Gibson posited the existence of the ambient optic array as a central part of his ecological approach to optics. For Gibson, perception is a bottom-up process, whereby the agent accesses information about the environment directly from invariant structures in the ambient optic array, rather than recovering it by means of complex cognitive processes. More controversially, Gibson claimed that agents can also directly pick-up the various affordances of the environment, or opportunities for the observer to act in the environment, from the ambient optic array.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
References
↑ J. J. Gibson (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Allen and Unwin, London.
↑ E.g., J. J. Gibson (1975). 'Affordances and behavior'. In E. S. Reed & R. Jones (eds.), Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson, pp. 410-411. Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale, NJ, 1 edn.
↑ J. J. Gibson (1979). 'The Theory of Affordances'. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (HMH), Boston. p.127.
↑ Gibson, James Jerome (1982). Reasons for Realism: Selected Essays of James J. Gibson. L. Erlbaum. p.411. ISBN978-0-89859-207-8.
1 2 Emma Williams and Alan Costall (2000), Taking Things More Seriously: Psychological Theories of Autism and the Material-Social Divide, ISBN0-415-16704-3.
↑ Osborne, Richard (15 December 2014). An Ecological Approach to Educational Technology: Affordance as a Design Tool for Aligning Pedagogy and Technology (Thesis). hdl:10871/16637. S2CID61739396.
↑ Norman, Donald (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition (2nded.). Basic Books. ISBN978-0465050659.[pageneeded]
1 2 Human–Computer Interaction, Preece et al. (1994, p. 6): The authors explicitly define perceived affordances as being a subset of all affordances, but another meaning is used later in the same paragraph by talking about "good affordance."
1 2 Universal Principles of Design, Lidwell, Holden & Butler (2003, p. 20): The authors first explain that round wheels are better suited for rolling than square ones and therefore better afford (i.e. allow) rolling, but later state that a door handle "affords" (i.e. suggests) pulling, but not pushing.
1 2 Faraj, S., & Azad, B. (2012). The Materiality of Technology: an Affordance Perspective. In Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World. ISBN9780199664054.[pageneeded]
↑ Wellman, Barry; Quan-Haase, Anabel; Boase, Jeffrey; Chen, Wenhong; Hampton, Keith; Díaz, Isabel; Miyata, Kakuko (23 June 2006). "The Social Affordances of the Internet for Networked Individualism". Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. 8 (3). doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2003.tb00216.x. S2CID26565346.
↑ Gaver, William W. (1991). "Technology affordances". Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems Reaching through technology - CHI '91. pp.79–84. doi:10.1145/108844.108856. ISBN978-0-89791-383-6. S2CID13171625.
Heras-Escribano, Manuel (2019). The Philosophy of Affordances. Springer. ISBN978-3-319-98830-6.
Withagen, Rob; van Wermeskerken, Margot (August 2010). "The Role of Affordances in the Evolutionary Process Reconsidered: A Niche Construction Perspective". Theory & Psychology. 20 (4): 489–510. doi:10.1177/0959354310361405. S2CID143464857.
Withagen, Rob; de Poel, Harjo J.; Araújo, Duarte; Pepping, Gert-Jan (August 2012). "Affordances can invite behavior: Reconsidering the relationship between affordances and agency". New Ideas in Psychology. 30 (2): 250–258. doi:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2011.12.003.
Heras-Escribano, Manuel; de Pinedo, Manuel (December 2016). "Are affordances normative?". Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. 15 (4): 565–589. doi:10.1007/s11097-015-9440-0. S2CID141890544.
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