Week 4: Affordance

An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. The term is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human-computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, instructional design and artificial intelligence. wikipedia definition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affordance


Basically affordance is a visual perception  of an individual, and this visual perception trigger an individual to perform an expected action. For example,  button of numbers of a calculator, hammer, a bag and more, these tools need not any instruction for user to read or understand in order to use the tool. The direction of understanding its function of a tool, is very straight forward/ direct perception and easy to use.

Affordance apply on variation of application, such as industrial design, human-computer interaction, interaction design and much more.
This is some example of simple yet useful and easy to understand tools:

Button of the calculator, especially the number, direct perception.

Hammer, a tool of holding and hitting.

Not all affordance are true/ function-able, it called false affordance, the best example is placebo button, basically is an useless button, you can push it but there are no effect/ outsome by pushing the button.