Affordance

Over on the lovely Pink Air, Jeffre Jackson remarks upon the popularity of gel buttons on the intermenet. He believes they have become ubiquitous because they contain all kinds of reality triggers. To steal his beautiful phrase:

They're artificially supersaturated with visual reality, so they're especially fascinating in the arid, 2-D environment of the web savannah.

All of which makes a lot of sense. But I think there is an additional factor that explains their popularity: affordance.

To steal from the Wikipedia:

An affordance is a property of an object, or a feature of the immediate environment, that indicates how to interface with that object or feature. The empty space within an open doorway, for instance, affords movement across that threshold. A couch affords the possibility of sitting down on it.

So inherent in the image of a button lies the means by which you interact with it, which is a remarkably useful quality when attempting to build navigation into a web page.

How does the button communicate this function? It must be using some kind of  language.

By understanding how objects communicate their affordance we gain a better understanding of how people parse the world around them. If we can understand this language we can build tools , and brands, that explain their own function.

Comments

[David Brabbins]

Hi Faris, how are you?

I'd venture that a less abstract definition of this quality is 'product semantics', the field of thought that an object's form (or in this case, apparent form) should communicate its function.

The theory goes that if a product's semantics are good, you shouldn't need to read the manual before using it. Apple springs to mind here, as it does all-too-often...

I reckon with the web buttons, there's an added quality of the designer visually referencing real-world objects, triggering our preconceptions of what the button's meant to do. And that for a while this was surprising in a world of flat, 2D-looking web buttons. Now they're near-ubiquitous though, we're still not bored of them, because we work better. A good thing I think.

[Dino]

"Affordance", what a great new word (for me at least).

Great post Faris.

D

[Faris]

Hi Dave - good thanks - hope you are too.

Yeah. Exactly. I've started thinking about it like somatic communication for products. So completely non-verbal body language of products. Or something.

In a way it's about making technology intuitive. Higher level programming languages all compile into Assembly and then binary. The more advanced the language, the more like English it becomes so the ultimate computer language would be one where you just talk to it and it does stuff. Like in Star Trek and that.

I like the idea of products' body language screaming "squeeze me!"

Also I've been thinking about how this somatic communication might apply to brand behaviour. Maybe more on that later.

Thanks Dino!

[John Grant]

Very interesting. A few random thoughts:

1. Affordance is 80% context?

A lot of what we call intelligence is to do with being able to fill in the blanks. It would be impossible to listen to a sentence word by word and leap to a meaning without this. Also look at IQ tests, where one of the most common formats is 'what is missing?' (eg complete the series). I read that we are the only species who could see a footprint and infer the animal which made it. It is all about being able to grasp the context and use this to interpret/predict/look for the details.

In this case, if I saw that gel button on:
- a medicine pack; I'd assume that's what the tablets looked like
- a chemistry set I'd assume there was some test involving liquid on a blotter
- above a door I would assume it was some sort of signal that recording was in progress

And on a website I am thinking 'where are the buttons'? I imagine you could construct many other signifiers which would do as well. Any geometric shape with a word within it would probably do.

(As I type, I notice the gel tablet in the bar to my right. This is there to indicate scrolling and if I want to drag it works like a handle not a button).

2. Affordance is interesting to apply to advertising and design too. What is the use of this artefact or advert? What does it want from me? Once again it is 80% context though. One of the important features of (new) new media is it leaves this doorway slightly more open & the involvement is always greater when trying to work this out.

3. Affordance - once you allow that it is mostly the space and not the content that is key - could be the basis of a whole school of media planning. It's not what the ad says or features which is critical, it is its assumed place in the greater scheme of things; is this an offer, a comforting fallacy, an act of desperation...? eg 'Never knowingly undersold' placed in 3 different media could be 'read' in these very different ways.

4. In experiments (presumably done before worries about vivisection loomed large) with putting objects into rats cages, what is observed is 1. terror (indicated by the subject freezing), 2, checking if it is edible, 3. checking if it can be mated with, 4. indifference. Our repertoire may be somewhat more involved but there are probably still relatively few answers to the global 'what is it for?' question when we first glimpse something?

5. The other value I would consider applying alongside Affordance is Authorship. Who created this (for what purpose of theirs)? Another general observation about human intelligence is that it is about connecting (through objects, words and signs) with other intelligences. We know that they know that we know....