Affordance

An affordance is the possibility of an action on an object or environment.

Though additional meanings have developed, the original definition in psychology includes all actions that are physically possible. When the concept was applied to design, it started also referring to only those action possibilities which one is aware of.

The word is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human–computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, communication studies, instructional design, science, technology and society (STS), and artificial intelligence.

Psychologist James J. Gibson originally introduced the term in his 1977 article "The Theory of Affordances" and explored it more fully in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. He defined affordances as all "action possibilities" latent in the environment, independent of an individual's ability to recognize them, but always in relation to agents (people or animals) and therefore dependent on their capabilities. For instance, a set of steps which rises four feet high does not afford the act of climbing if the actor is a crawling infant. Gibson's is the prevalent definition in cognitive psychology.

Affordances were further studied by Eleanor J. Gibson, wife of James J. Gibson, who created her theory of perceptual learning around this concept. Eleanor Gibson's book, An Ecological Approach to Perceptual Learning and Development explores affordances further.

Jakob von Uexküll had already discussed the concept in the early twentieth century, calling it the "functional tinting" (funktionale Tönung) of organisms with respect to stimuli.

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