Contextualizebeta

affordance

noun

Etymology

From afford + -ance; coined in 1977 by psychologist James J. Gibson, and adopted in 1988 by Donald Norman in the context of human-machine interaction.

  1. derived from *furþą✻ — “forth, forward”
  2. derived from *furþōną✻
  3. inherited from forþian
  4. inherited from afforthen
  5. suffixed as affordance — “afford + ance”

Definitions

  1. Anything that is provided or furnished by an environment to an organism dwelling within…

    Anything that is provided or furnished by an environment to an organism dwelling within it.

    • So an affordance cannot be measured as we measure in physics.

  2. A potential transaction or operation that is made possible by a given object or…

    A potential transaction or operation that is made possible by a given object or environment; especially, one that is made easily discoverable.

  3. Any interactive control or component serving as a cue to the user to take some action.

    • The grab handles on the edges of this image are affordances that the user can exploit to change the size of the image.

The neighborhood

Vish — recursive loop

No curated loop yet for affordance. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.

sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA