Technology affordances

William W. Gaver
1991 Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems Reaching through technology - CHI '91  
Ecological approaches to psychology suggest succinct accounts of easily-used artifacts. Affordances are properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for people's interactions. When affordances are perceptible, they offer a direct link between perception and action; hidden and false affordances lead to mistakes. Complex actions can be understood in terms of groups of affordances that are sequential in time or nested in space, and in terms of the abilities of different media to
more » ... veal them. I illustrate this discussion with several examples of interface techniques, and suggest that the concept of affordances can provide a useful tool for user-centered analyses of technologies.
doi:10.1145/108844.108856 dblp:conf/chi/Gaver91 fatcat:c6ulzzfjgnglzde5btvevdj2de