Dear Don
Wow this is fantastic. Appreciate your generous post and time. Yes appreciate this. There's a lot here that's very helpful.
Yes its "perceived affordances" that I'm after, now as I read what's coming in. I'm going through all of this with great excitement. I'm inclined towards the idea of affordances that are so after some (creative) interpretive act by the user.
Some quick thoughts: I see that signifiers are or should be put in there by (good) designers to help communicate these intended affordances of the product, and we should have more of these. However, here we are looking at the designer, with powers to truly shape the product.
But also interesting for me is the user, who may simultaneously be involved in the (re)design of the product. Exactly like the way you re-designed the word/sign-vehicle "affordances", or "signifiers" Gunther Kress style. How can we discover or invent, as user-designers, new affordances of a product? I'm thinking about users who have no way or have no power to change the designs (as designers do by contrast). Say someone stuck with certain tools which he or she cannot modify substantially, or stuck with certain policies or discourses which he or she has no power to alter radically: and still to design/invent new affordances in these that are of interest and beneficial to the user-designer. (I tried to explore this in my Lond Rev of Education piece, "Saving the Teacher's Soul: Exorcising the Terrors of Performativity--but had not discovered the concept or idea of affordances) Or take something very ubiquitous--a point and shoot camera, on the iphone, etc--and discover and invent new affordances. A kind of Simonian design without final goals: new sideeffects that can be preferred seem to suggest now a new affordance.
Perhaps many of these affordances are discovered by chance. Then education can be precisely to generate or communicate signifiers for these new affordances. The generation of these new signifiers could be a kind of design research, whereas the communication is the teaching of these discovered affordances. And this would be something relevant to many people, who are users (and also Designers), but not professional designers.
Walter Benjamin's piece on captions and the beautification of suffering is a set of interesting signifiers for how he sees photography can have peculiar affordances for critical consciousness raising. Perhaps there's a kind of "design education" aimed not at professional designers but user-designers, to give them signifiers for new conceptions of how something (a tool) can afford this or that. In this way a the Design of everyday things--not by the professional designer, but by the user.
Apologies for rambling.
Very best
Jude
-----Original Message-----
From: PhD-Design - This list is for discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Don Norman
Sent: Thursday, 9 February, 2012 1:30 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Affordances: A brief review
Affordances! Ah, how can I resist.
-----
On Tue, Feb 7, 2012 at 5:39 PM, CHUA Soo Meng Jude (PLS)
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
I was speaking to a colleague in another department about my musings
on semiotics and photography, or the camera and he introduced this
idea of affordances to me.
---------
So here is a brief review of my understanding of affordances,
including how I came to introduce this notion into design. This is a
biased account: I am certain that others on this list will be able to
correct my biases.
National Institute of Education (Singapore) http://www.nie.edu.sg
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