When I google “affordances”, I mainly get results about UX design and human-computer interaction. This makes sense: a big part of designing products (be they software or hardware) is about making sure the user has all the right affordances. If you design a new kitchen implement which requires a pumping action, you want the user to immediately have a “pumping action” affordance when they see it.
Possibly relevant history: the word affordance AFAICT comes from the book “The Design of Everyday Things.” The Design of Everyday things was actually originally going to be called “The Psychology of Everyday things”, but marketing people were worried about it being a confusing title.
The book is in IMO “The Sequences, if they were written by someone trying to improve product design rather than someone trying to build artificial intelligence.” It covers System 1 and System 2, various cognitive biases, etc, weaving them together with design principles.
Particularly noteworthy: the book actually introduces two terms – affordances, and signifiers, which often get confused. From this random article I just googled:
An affordance is something an object (or dashboard) can do. A tap/faucet can run hot or cold water, for example.
A signifier is an indicator of some sort. In our tap example, this might be red/blue dots signifying which way to turn the tap to get hot or cold water.
Possibly relevant history: the word affordance AFAICT comes from the book “The Design of Everyday Things.” The Design of Everyday things was actually originally going to be called “The Psychology of Everyday things”, but marketing people were worried about it being a confusing title.
The book is in IMO “The Sequences, if they were written by someone trying to improve product design rather than someone trying to build artificial intelligence.” It covers System 1 and System 2, various cognitive biases, etc, weaving them together with design principles.
Particularly noteworthy: the book actually introduces two terms – affordances, and signifiers, which often get confused. From this random article I just googled:
Wikipedia gives a pretty different history, according to which the term comes originally from psychology, not design.
Welp, today I learned. (“It originated in psychology” feels consistent with my previous beliefs, but I didn’t know about all this history of it)