Affordance: What a great word! Finally a term to explain something that I’ve been thinking a lot about lately. I’ve been passively marinating on the power of an object to infer a suggested use, such that when said object’s power meshes with our own intuitive use of the thing a harmony occurs. Mostly this comes from watching Jay pick up random things and sometimes the object and the dude just mesh and he knows what to do with the thing he is holding. Other times, there is a massive disconnect, like when he tries to hammer things on his tool bench with his wrench and twists screws with the back of the hammer. Amazing thing, this brain of ours.
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When: Feb 7, 2009 9:00:00 PM
Where: M Shanghai Den in Brooklyn,New York
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Have you ever read _The Design of Everyday Things_ (Amazon)? It’s a great read that talks about the “user interfaces” of all kinds of things from doors to car radios. It’s a big reason why I invested in knobs and pulls for my new kitchen doors and drawers — I can’t stand not knowing which side of a cabinet door to pull on, and I like the nice handle of a pull, not clutching at sides and bottoms of doors and drawers hoping they’ll respond. The same implications apply to electronic user interfaces, IMHO.
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Chris. I assume at 8:14AM this morning you collapsed headfirst onto your keyboard ;-)
Anyway, now that i’ve got a better handle on the practical implications of affordance I see it everywhere. I think google is probably one of the best examples of affordance on the web today. You go to the page and assuming you have some notion of what the web is, you know *exactly* what to do.
Kel and i work from home on fridays and share the homeoffice (a ‘la Hart to Hart ;-) Anyway, she just gave me a heads up that apraxia is what happens when an individual loses the ability to use objects that have high affordance.
temporary apraxia can be brought on by excessive beer intake. interestingly enough ALL forms of the disorder are experienced and yet somehow the symptoms are gone after a day or so.
The other day the black ink on my HP PSC 1210 scanner/copier/printer went kaput. The old ink cartridge snapped right out, the replacement snapped right in, just like the cartoons on the door showed. As soon as I closed the bay door, the printer ran off a test page that printed further instructions on scanning the test for alignment, etc. Talk about affordance! The machine knew just what to do and then showed me in text and pictures exactly how to maintain it.
It reminds me of a client of mine long ago raving about his IBM mini (maybe an AS400?). One day an IBM tech showed up at their facility saying a hard drive on the machine was bad and he was there to replace it. Apparently the machine had contacted IBM because it saw that there was a problem. No human intervention was required to get the service tech.
Oh, and my replacement ink cartridge also came with a business reply envelope to mail the old cartridge back to HP for recycling. It cost me nothing and was completely painless. Very good engineering. I love anything that’s designed well, performs as advertised (or better), and is easy to maintain.
ky