Brett Bligh:
"The literature basically doesn't agree on what "affordance" means, or even how valid the concept is. The term is discussed a lot within the field of human-computer interaction, where it is used to mean (roughly, off the top of my head) 'what properties some tool can offer to its users'. But this sort of definition is not really very clear. So, for example, there is a well-known disagreement in HCI between two people -- Gaver and Norman -- about whether an affordance is a "real property" of some item, or only exists if the user can "perceive" it.
If we follow the first approach, then obviously affordances are quite static and linked to physical properties. If we take the perception approach, then we might naively think that an affordance is some relation between a tool and a person.
My own perspective is to say that it is obvious from empirical studies that what we are able to perceive about a tool is strongly influenced by our context -- what we are doing now, how we have done that before, and how we expect that we might be able to do it in the future. In other words, tools are not related to people, but to particular practices. Sutherland et al. discuss the notion that tools are actually crystallised versions of human practices, and this is what I am also pointing to here, though I am arriving at the conclusion by a different route.
This does leave an interesting question open, though: tools can be used as part of practices that are different from those within which they were conceived, and can even be the object of reflection by their users (who might want to improve them in some way). Here is where Sutherland's discussion of Wartofsky's work comes in.
I hope that helps a bit. Tool-use and associated forms of perception have been investigated and theorised for a very great period of time, and I'm aware that any attempt to summarise such a great amount of work in only a few words can sometimes result in very dense text indeed.
Brett"
"The literature basically doesn't agree on what "affordance" means, or even how valid the concept is. The term is discussed a lot within the field of human-computer interaction, where it is used to mean (roughly, off the top of my head) 'what properties some tool can offer to its users'. But this sort of definition is not really very clear. So, for example, there is a well-known disagreement in HCI between two people -- Gaver and Norman -- about whether an affordance is a "real property" of some item, or only exists if the user can "perceive" it.
If we follow the first approach, then obviously affordances are quite static and linked to physical properties. If we take the perception approach, then we might naively think that an affordance is some relation between a tool and a person.
My own perspective is to say that it is obvious from empirical studies that what we are able to perceive about a tool is strongly influenced by our context -- what we are doing now, how we have done that before, and how we expect that we might be able to do it in the future. In other words, tools are not related to people, but to particular practices. Sutherland et al. discuss the notion that tools are actually crystallised versions of human practices, and this is what I am also pointing to here, though I am arriving at the conclusion by a different route.
This does leave an interesting question open, though: tools can be used as part of practices that are different from those within which they were conceived, and can even be the object of reflection by their users (who might want to improve them in some way). Here is where Sutherland's discussion of Wartofsky's work comes in.
I hope that helps a bit. Tool-use and associated forms of perception have been investigated and theorised for a very great period of time, and I'm aware that any attempt to summarise such a great amount of work in only a few words can sometimes result in very dense text indeed.
Brett"
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