Understanding Affordances.
Reflection Week 3: Design and the Human Condition
This week’s class focused on affordances. This is something Interaction Majors studied last semester and so I was familiar with the terminology.
Affordances refer to the relationship between an object and the person it relates to. They define what actions are possible. For example, a floor has to afford being hard, stable and horizontal for a person to walk on it without stumbling. When talking about affordances, we refer to mental or conceptual models as well. These are cognitive maps in a user’s mind. They inform the user’s expectations of a certain interaction or basically how something works. Discoverability of these affordances depends on signifiers which specify how a user will discover the possibilities of that object.
During class, we did an activity where we split into groups to think about objects available in environments such as an office or a school. We then had to sort these objects into categories depending on them having strong, real, weak, virtual and perceived affordances.
I was in the group “Office”. One object that had strong and real affordances was a water dispenser. The user is able to instinctively identify it as a water dispenser and able to understand one switch, button or lever will give cold water and one will give warm water. The feedback provided by the signifiers of the water dispenser with color coding, a light to indicate hot water and the provided space to put a mug or cup also put it in the strong and real affordance category. An example of an object with a perceptible affordance in an office as per Bill Gaver’s definition .would be a mug. It affords containment, drinking and holding for the user. However, in offices, mugs are used for stationery as well. This is a perceived affordance as it is what the user thinks the object can do, not what it was made for.
However, I do think the class was chaotic and confused during the activity. The vocabulary used was also confusing at times, especially the perceived and perceptible notion of affordances. Don Norman calls affordances as perceivable action possibilities and Bill Gaver uses the word perceptible to define real affordances. The similarity of words was only cleared up due to the Interaction class I had. Also, thinking of random objects and determining their affordances added to a lot of confusion as every student was using their own mental model. If we had products or objects in front us we could observe and then deduce their affordances, that would have been better. In our Interaction class, we did a similar activity but we observed spaces around us and thus, talked about their affordances. For example, my given activity was “sitting” so I observed and documented things in my house that afforded sitting such as my closet, my desk chair, the floor, the staircase railing etc. Having done primary research and documentation allowed me to understand affordances much better than the activity we did in class. A variation of the activity we could have done was perhaps each student could pick around 20–30 objects in their homes (due to the quarantine) and put them in the four categories. This way, perhaps the activity would have been much clearer.
