Gibson Affordances and Norman Affordances

June 26, 2002 at 10 am · Filed under Usability/User Research

Found another good article called Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept [pdf] that describes differences between J.J. Gibson’s original concept of affordances and how it was later extended by Don Norman. It gets a bit nitpicky about how each has used the term affordance, and goes so far as to do a literature review on usage of the term affordance in various CHI Proceedings, but it’s worth reading if you use the term, and it’s also a great jumping point to other literature on affordances.

If you aren’t going to read the whole article, here’s what the authors define as the main differences:

Gibson’s Affordances

  • Offerings or action possibilities in the environment in relation to the action capabilities of an actor
  • Independent of the actor’s experience, knowledge, culture, or ability to perceive
  • Existence is binary - an affordance exists or it does not exist

    Norman’s Affordances

  • Perceived properties that may or may not actually exist
  • Suggestions or clues as to how to use the properties
  • Can be dependent on the experience, knowledge, or culture of the actor
  • Can make an action difficult or easy

    From McGrenere and Ho, 2000

    • 1 Comment

    1. Anonymous said,

      July 1, 2002 @ 9 am

      The URL for the PDF is broken because of a space before the filename. I tried removing the space and the link works fine:

      http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/~joanna/papers/gi_2000_affordances.pdf

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