to be clear, David misunderstood my comments:
-----
On Wed, Nov 16, 2016 at 4:14 PM, David Sless <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> According to Don:
> > Affordance is a well-established technical term in design. If you do not
> > understand the meaning of affordance, well, I am amazed: the term has
> been
> > around since the late 1980s, so long that it is overused in sometimes
> > inappropriate ways.
>
> I’m sometimes amazed and left speechless! But decided to overcome that on
> this occasion
>
> Here is a different account.
>
> The term affordances was coined by J.J Gibson
> http://cs.brown.edu/courses/cs137/readings/Gibson-AFF.pdf
>
> The three most important works to look at are:
> Gibson, J.J. (1966). The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems. Boston:
> Houghton Mifflin.
> Gibson, J.J. (1977). The Theory of Affordances (pp. 67–82). In R. Shaw &
> J. Bransford (eds.). Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing: Toward an Ecological
> Psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
> Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston:
> Houghton Mifflin.
>
> -----------
I stated design encountered affordance in the late 1980s. Of course the
term came from JJ Gibson's work. I have been crediting him with the
invention of the term in al of my writings for thirty years! He and I were
friends. We used to debate many facets of psychology -- we both enjoyed the
debates immensely. My date was not meant to indicate when the term was
coined but when it entered Design.
I introduced his term to design in the 1988 edition of the Psychology of
Everyday Things (now called "Design of ..." -- identical book except for
that one word). I have also stated many times that Gibson would not
approve of the way I used affordances: Gibson refused to admit to any
internal processing by the brain: he insisted that it was straight
"information pickup," which is we we fought so hard. I thought then, and
still do, that to deny information p[rocessing mechanisms within the brain
is to deny reality.
---
I have written a lot about affordances, perceived affordances, and more
recently 'Signfiers" to try to clarify the different concepts revolving
around affordance. (Yes, "signifiers" comes from semiotics).
Since 1988, affordance is widely used on many design disciplines:
interaction design, interface design, architecture, industrial and product
design, urban planning and design, landscape design, engineering design,
....
--
That's all I will say. I am lurking but not responding to the many debates
on what the word might mean or where it might have come from. I find it all
quite amusing
Don
Don Norman
Prof. and Director, DesignLab, UC San Diego
[log in to unmask] designlab.ucsd.edu/ www.jnd.org <http://www.jnd.org/>
Multiple faculty positions in design at UC San Diego
http://d.ucsd.edu/jobs/
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