Affordances in the Digital Era

The Concept of Affordances and its Utility in the Digital Era

An affordance designates the capacity of an object to support an action. J.J. Gibson (1979) explains the process of affordances in an ecological context to examine what a specific environment accords an animal in that space and the ways animals leverage the capabilities of the environment to perform certain actions. In the digital era, the term affordance expands its parameters to include the design of digital interfaces. Situating Gibson’s idea of affordance in a digital context: the environment is a virtual space created by digital technology and the animal is the human user. There is interconnectivity between how a user adapts to an object, and how an animal adapts to its environment, with the user having an impact on the object it utilizes and vice-versa. While explaining the implications for affordances, Gibson claims, “The affordance of something does not change as the need of the observer changes. The observer may or may not perceive or attend to the affordance, according to his needs, but the affordance, being invariant, is always there to be perceived” (1979, p. 140-41). The affordances of an object exist whether the user recognizes it or not. 

For instance, there could be a variety of users using the same type of smartphone interface, yet utilize different features and capabilities of it depending on their needs. It is critical to understand that an affordance is not dependent on the design or construction of an object but on the potentiality of uses that it makes possible. Thus, the introduction of affordance as a noun by Gibson (1979) has evolved in the digitalized era to designate “A situation where an object’s sensory characteristics intuitively imply its functionality and use” (Borowska, 2015). Discoverability or intuitiveness is an interesting concept that in essence adjectivizes affordance.

Initially, affordance as a term was leveraged to express “the functions that the physical properties of an object make possible” (Murray 2012, p. 4), though it ought to have an indirect link to the emotional response triggered through physical tinkering that the mind registers. Thus, the environmental and emotional qualities triggered by digital interactions can enable “meaningful engagement, motivated by the informational needs of users” (Lupton 2014, p. 133). For instance, the use of a certain application can trigger peculiar emotions. This leads us to delve deeper into elements of interconnectedness between the object and the user that sheds light on the idea of perception. It is important to note that perception of animals or users impact the way they utilize the environment or the object. In the digital age, perception works as another key factor: a skill or tool for the arena of digital affordances, because affordance tends to exist regardless of its recognition. Hence, the core to the theory of digital affordance is the object, the user, and one’s perception.

References:

Borowska, P. (2015, April 7). 6 TYPES OF DIGITAL AFFORDANCE THAT IMPACT YOUR UX. Retrieved July 2, 2015

Gibson, J. (1979). The ecological approach to visual perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Lupton, E. (2014). Beautiful users: Designing for people (p. 142). Princeton Architectural Press. Murray, J. (2012). Inventing the medium: Principles of interaction design as a cultural practice. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Digital Interfaces and the User-friendliness

User-friendliness of the Digital Interfaces and the Systems of Control

The digital interface as being transparent or user-friendly describes the device’s ease of usability, also referred to as device’s intuitiveness. In Inventing the Medium, Janet H. Murray (2012) states, “Intuitive means drawing on our unconscious expectations about how things behave, expectations that come from experience and from ideas about the world that we have internalized so deeply that we don’t think about them consciously. Intuitions about the world are often based on repeated experience or established conventions” (p. 9). This is important in understanding that transparency or intuitiveness of an interface does not emerge from a vacuum, but rather from familiarity with the interface and previous experience of the user with a similar device that causes the user-friendliness. As Murray (2012) states, “it is an appropriate design strategy to exploit the user unconscious expectations and knowledge to cue their interaction with a new artifact or process, making the experience feel intuitive rather than difficult to understand or hard to learn (p. 9), which is important for the user-friendliness of an interface that depends on substantial reliance of user’s past recognition of interface functionality. The interface as being transparent signifies its conceptual invisibility.

In order to make sense of the system of control constituted by the interface, it is crucial to understand the idea of a ‘metaphor’. In the article, Impossibility of the Interface, Fuller (2004) described the metaphor as being useful in generating a way for users to imaginally map out in advance what functional capacity a device has by reference to a pre-existing apparatus (p. 100), which is pivotal to understand that Graphical User Interface (GUI) is a metaphor, a means of controlling the machine, as well as a way of grasping its nerve. Fuller (2004) states: “An interface is a contact surface. It reflects the physical properties of the users, the functions to be performed, and the balance of power and control (p. 99)”, which is significant, for that interface is indivisible from the system it is part of. Moreover, interface grants the user the power to monitor and control various separate elements in a device while maintaining the balance by not allowing a user to ‘alter’ the elements. Interfaces compose a system of control through discipline. Fuller (2004) explains the discipline as a ‘mold’ that allows an interface to remain something discrete, neutral that eventually constructs predictability through experience. He explains ‘Control’ as a process of constant ‘modulation’ that demands the constant renewal of adherence to codes and processes. Fuller thus concludes interface to be a manipulation between discipline, predictability and vague devious implication of control. Therefore, for an interface the ‘experience’ is a by-product of a combination of transparency and control. User-friendliness is a technique disciplining the body. Eventually, we are shaped with the interfaces that come to control our bodies, and hence we adapt our bodies to the systems of control. Perhaps, power becomes something through which we adapt our bodies to a system of control. The system of control then becomes synonymous with the “natural-ness” of the interface guiding the process of navigation and getting ‘things’ done.

References:

Murray, J. H. (2012). Inventing the medium. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press.

Fuller, M. (2003). The impossibility of Interface. Behind the Blip, 99-100.