Concept
Affordance
Overview
In psychology, affordance is what the environment offers the individual. In design, affordance has a narrower meaning; it refers to possible actions that an actor can readily perceive.
American psychologist James J. Gibson coined the term in his 1966 book, The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems, and it occurs in many of his earlier essays. His best-known definition is from his 1979 book, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception:The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. ... It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.
The word is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology; cognitive psychology; environmental psychology; evolutionary psychology; criminology; industrial design; human–computer interaction (HCI); interaction design; user-centered design; communication studies; instructional design; science, technology, and society (STS); sports science; and artificial intelligence.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
II. _The Critical Philosophy._ 40.] In common with Empiricism the Critical Philosophy assumes that experience affords the one sole foundation for cognitions; which however it does not allow to rank as truths, but only as knowledge of phenomena. The Critical theory starts originally from the distinction of elements presented in the analysis of experience, viz. the matter of sense, and its universal relations.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Affordance is.
A bundle of this latter sort, at a given time, is called a "perspective"; taken throughout a period of time, it is called a "biography." Subjectivity is the characteristic of perspectives and biographies, the characteristic of giving the view of the world from a certain place. We saw in Lecture VII that this characteristic involves none of the other characteristics that are commonly associated with mental phenomena…
Bertrand Russell, The Analysis of Mind
States what Affordance is.
3. The Social Medium as Educative. Our net result thus far is that social environment forms the mental and emotional disposition of behavior in individuals by engaging them in activities that arouse and strengthen certain impulses, that have certain purposes and entail certain consequences. A child growing up in a family of musicians will inevitably have whatever capacities he has in music stimulated, and…
John Dewey, Democracy and Education
Close in meaning to Affordance; the term itself is not named.
Related ideas
- Artificial intelligence
- Intentionality
- Visual perception
- Psychology
- Human brain
- Taylor & Francis
- Cognitive psychology
- Design
- Evolutionary psychology
- Instructional design
Place in the tradition
Part of Embodied cognition.