8 Things to Consider When Attempting to Study Affordances (original) (raw)
Related papers
Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human …, 1991
Ecological approaches to psychology suggest succinct accounts ofeasily-used artifacts. Affordances are properties of the world that are compatible with and relevant for people's interactions.
This study aims to clarify inconsistencies regarding the term affordances by examining how affor-dances terminology is used in empirical research on communication and technology. Through an analysis of 82 communication-oriented scholarly works on affordances, we identify 3 inconsistencies regarding the use of this term. First, much research describes a particular affordance without engaging other scholarship addressing that affordance. Second, several studies identify " lists " of affordances without conceptually developing individual affordances within those lists. Third, the affordances perspective is evoked in situations where the purported affordance does not meet commonly accepted definitions. We conclude with a set of criteria to aid scholars in evaluating their assumptions about affordances and to facilitate a more consistent approach to its conceptualization and application.
The Concept of Affordances in Digital Media
This chapter outlines the origins and meaning of the concept of affordances, presents some examples, and discusses its relevance to studies of digital media. It suggests that the uniquely socially malleable nature of digital media, the variety of uses they engender, and the simultaneous awareness of the limitations of the mediated interaction that they allow explain the increased use of affordances in analyses of digital media.
Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory
Creative Commons CC-BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). SI: Culture Digitally For this essay, we turn to one commonly used term in that literature that warrants significant reconsideration—if not reconstruction—affordance. A widely used keyword for communication technology studies, affordance nevertheless lacks a clear definition in the communication and media studies literature. We will argue that communication scholars have misappropriated an outdated definition of affordance from psychology that neither fits with how the term is used in that discipline nor helps communication scholars advance theory of our own. Emerging approaches to materiality within communication, attention to affect and emotion, and renewed interest in the processes of mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced notion of technological affor-dance than the communication field currently uses. When scholars use " affordances and constraints " to describe the qualities of communication technologies and media, they tap into concepts rooted in a history of scholarly conversations. However, we would argue the phrase now fails to capture the complexity of the interactive production of the stuff of communication and the richness of the emerging new scholarship that gives serious attention to the materiality, affect, and media on which communication are built. As a corrective, we propose the concept imagined affor-dance. We mean imagined affordance in three distinct ways. First, communication scholars have imagined a consensus or clarity around the term " affordance, " which lacks in reality a clear definition within the communication literature. Second, imagined affordance evokes the imagination of both users and designers—expectations for technology that are not fully realized in conscious, rational knowledge but are nonetheless concretized or materialized in socio-technical systems. Affordances are, we argue, in large part imagined by users, a meaning of affordance that we get from psychology that has Abstract In this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication—affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and other such " smart " innovations. Within technology studies, emerging theories of materiality, affect, and mediation all necessitate a richer and more nuanced definition for affordance than the field currently uses. To solve this, we develop the concept of imagined affordance. Imagined affordances emerge between users' perceptions, attitudes, and expectations; between the materiality and functionality of technologies; and between the intentions and perceptions of designers. We use imagined affordance to evoke the importance of imagination in affordances—expectations for technology that are not fully realized in conscious, rational knowledge. We also use imagined affordance to distinguish our process-oriented, socio-technical definition of affordance from the " imagined " consensus of the field around a flimsier use of the term. We also use it in order to better capture the importance of mediation, materiality, and affect. We suggest that imagined affordance helps to theorize the duality of materiality and communication technology: namely, that people shape their media environments, perceive them, and have agency within them because of imagined affordances.
The Materiality of Technology: An Affordance Perspective
Materiality and Organizing: Social Interaction in a Technological World, 2012
The research at the nexus of technology-organizational change has converged on the materiality of technology as a fundamental theoretical concern. In this paper, we highlight three major weaknesses in how the extant research conceptualizes technology: conflation of product categories over technologies; superimposition of feature and technology; and static conception of technology over time. We then point out how these weaknesses tend to decontextualize technology-in-use and thus under-emphasize technology’s materiality. We go on to propose affordances as a viable scaffolding to undergird the development of a conceptual apparatus that takes account of materiality more holistically and in a more relational manner. We conclude by pointing out the challenges ahead in the further development of affordances concept to account for technology’s materiality.
2019
n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory
Organizational Affordances: A Structuration Theory Approach to Affordances
Interacting with Computers, 2016
Where a licence is displayed above, please note the terms and conditions of the licence govern your use of this document. When citing, please reference the published version. Take down policy While the University of Birmingham exercises care and attention in making items available there are rare occasions when an item has been uploaded in error or has been deemed to be commercially or otherwise sensitive.
Affordances of online technologies: More than the properties of the technology
Australian Educational Computing
This paper argues that concepts derived from affordance theories are highly useful in understanding the role of online technologies in learning. However, it is suggested that the value of this approach is maximised when the focus is moved away from the inherent properties of the technologies to the opportunities for learning provided by the total context in which the technologies are embedded. Recent examples from educational literature are used to illustrate this approach to the interpretation and application of affordance theories.
Affordance Theory in the IS Discipline: a Review and Synthesis of the Literature
The growing interest of IS researchers in using the theory of Affordances for studying the uses and consequences of the IT artefact calls for an integrative view on the subject. The originating literature is dispersed and the definition of the concept of affordance varies in these studies. With this paper we offer a framework for organizing the existing interdisciplinary literature modeling affordances' manifestation as effects of actions. Using a structured methodology, we reviewed the titles and abstracts of 126 articles from IS, Organization Studies, and Management literatures and examine a subset of 25 articles. Our work makes three main contributions. First it formalizes the concept of affordance as instanced in the IS domain. Second, it organizes IS affordance studies around four main areas: affordance existence, affordance perception, affordance actualization, and affordance effect. Finally, it discusses the current limitations of Affordance studies and offers the basis for future research.