Session 3
18.09.20
The relation between an individual/human being and an object in its environment, where the object’s affordance may be equally as important as the person’s perceived affordance which might not be the intended affordance, can be explained in a simpler way by saying that all action possibilities with an object based on users’ physical capabilities is called an affordance.
An example helps to make it easier to understand: A chair is meant to be sat on, but you sit on it because you see that it is capable of being sat on. You would sit on a wooden chair in the heat but you wouldn’t sit on a metal chair because of the temperature of the chair.
There’s also a distinction between weak and strong affordances; If your product packaging is such that a person knows how to open it as soon as they see it then that’s a strong affordance, but if it takes them a while to do so, it’s a weak affordance. A strong affordance needs little to no clues as to how to be used.
A false affordance is when something that you think can do something, actually cant. A hidden affordance is something you don’t perceive to be capable of doing anything but it actually is without you thinking too much about it.
James Gibson coined the term ‘affordance’, an idea later borrowed by Don Norman. The object affords different kinds of actions for different kinds of beings.
For example, from the activity conducted in class, we found out that there are some objects that have a different affordance for a certain person even though the setting and environment was the same for everyone. To go into detail; a group of students had to list down objects in the categories, Weak, Strong, Perceived and Real affordance. They were given one of the four settings; school, home, office, street. While listing things, a lot of the objects people would put in real affordance seemed like perceived to others and vice versa.
This could conclude with the results of the activity being how there are certain objects that are undeniably performing the act they were designed for, some do more than just that and some give us the idea that they work a certain way for us, but it’s not quite so.