Commonly, we see an affordance as the design of an object or space directly informing how it will be used. That assumes that it is a good design that is intuitive to interact with. We have all seen faulty designs, where the affordance isn’t intuitive and the users develop their own workaround.
JJ Gibson coined the term ‘affordance’ in 1966. The definition can be summarized as, “Affordance theory states that the world is perceived not only in terms of object shapes and spatial relationships but also in terms of object possibilities for action (affordances) — perception drives action.”
Don Norman prefers the term “perceived affordance,” because we care more about how an object is perceived than what’s actually true.
Example 1 from Universal Principles of Design: Legos
Example 2 from InteractionDesign.org: Car Door Handles
Example 3 from my office kitchen: Ikea Paper Towel Dispenser
I think there are a lot of children’s toys that can teach us valuable lessons about affordance. In addition to Legos, there are Tinker Toys, Lincoln Logs, Duplo…it seems like toy designers really have to get inside the minds of their users to create an easy to use, but highly ‘sticky’ and engaging product. But some obviously endure better than others 🙂
Affordance
I love your example of using the Legos for examples of affordances. The Lego is most likely one of the most easily used tools because of how easy it is for our minds to figure out the affordances for sticking two Legos together.
I also love how you have the image of the door knobs. I think we take for granted that the car door handle is a relatively new invention that needed to be designed from scratch for the use of opening car doors. When the designers created the first door handles, they were masters of designing a device that a user’s mind could almost effortlessly figure out how to open the cat door.
The Glossary of Human Computer Interaction
https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/book/the-glossary-of-human-computer-interaction/affordances