Many designers talk about “affordances” as properties of the technologies that they design – but there is less discussion of the other facet of Gibson’s work – which was the idea that affordances can be directly specified by information that is revealed as one acts (e.g., the optical flow patterns that specify an impending collision). The interface representations that we design determine whether the affordances are well specified – and ultimately determine the level of skill at which those affordances can be wielded.
Posted by John Flach