Technology affordances

This article more focus about the relation with technology and affordance, from the angle of technology, why affordances should be paid high attention to. And also the users’ culture, experience and learning can become the important part to deicide the actual perception of affordances. On the other way, the technology like media can offer the stage for affordance to be utilized well. So mainly, I want to mention three parts to express what I get from the article.

      Affordance is kind of abstract concept for people to understand at first time, but affordance really deeply connected with people’s interactions and human actions. The reason why people link the affordance to the technology is that technology itself remains the capabilities and limitation for people, so affordance as a tool to help people how to use the technology, also it can serve the strength and weakness of technologies. In addition the affordance have ecological approaches and cognitive approaches. In the article it takes the climbing as an example, the affordance for the climbing and the users have close interaction. Meanwhile, the concept comes from perception and action, metaphor and learning and sth else.

      Above all what are affordances? Firstly, we should think of our human organic system, the affordances should offer the tips for human to figure out how they input their action to the technologies.

     Tools afford different actions,and here I would like to mention the differences between the smart phone and keyboard phone. The keyboard phone through the keyboard to afford the signal for users to interact with it, but for the smart phone, it requires higher design skills for users to figure out how to manage it at the first time. Therefore, making affordances perceptible is one approach to designing easily-used system. Moreover, in author’s view, appearance play an important role on offering perceptible affordances. 

      Secondarily the actual perception of affordance was influenced by observer’s culture, social setting and experience,etc. So it seemed that we can design and analyze our own term of affordances. The perceptual system make possible are relevant to culture.  For example, I want to show the users that something is a button, so I should utilize the various graphical techniques to make the button looks like a button for users to figure out easily.  However, it doesn’t mean the more perceptual information, the better effect will come out. I like the sentence from the article, the role of a good interface is to guide attention via well-designed groups of sequential and nested affordances.

     The last part is about modes,media and affordances. Through the role of media can make affordances are very diverse, users can see or hear to get use to the technology, which are easier for user to understand.