Reflection Paper Week 3

In today’s class we discussed Affordances. In particular we were discussing the reading that we had to do, ’Technology Affordances’ by William W. Gaver. So what i understood early on in the lecture, an affordance is basically something that an object provides that makes us want to engage in an action with it. I know this isn’t very well put but to give an example, as sir Ahmed mentioned in class, a door knob. Door handles are made in many ways, one of the common designs being a knob. The way a knob works is that we first grab onto the knob and then we rotate it. The way we figure this out is by the shape of the knob and once you hold the knob, after using some of our grey matter, we figure it out. Now, upon further discussion about this, within the class it was mentioned many times by sir Ahmed that a door ‘knob’ is not the best design, because it does not convey its affordance, its ability to rotate, through its design. Of course the argument is, well everyone knows how to open a knob, why is it so difficult, we have to understand that we are all born into this world surrounded by these designs and objects. We know because we live in it. The reason why a door knob may not be a very good conveyer of its affordance is because a person who has never used a door knob would have to try playing with it to some extent in order to finally be able to understand how it works. Good affordances are those that require the least or most simple interactions. If the affordance is clear through the design, only then will we be able have a clear interaction. I felt like i had to emphasize on this part of the class more because it clears up a lot about what an affordance is and why even something as common as a door knob may not be the best one out there. We also need to understand that affordances will be different in different parts of the world, mainly due to culture. I remember us talking about the steering wheels in America and then locally. Furthermore we talked about successful affordances, these are those that provide some form of feedback of any level that makes the user know that it is working. Somewhere around the middle we discussed about different materials providing different affordances, wood and metal benches provide the same affordance but people would rather choose the wood because the metal would conduct temperature making it difficult for people to withstand the heat or cold it holds within itself. An amazing point by Ms Tazeen was regarding packaging design. If people figure out how to open a package easily, that is a good affordance because it showed clearly how to open or close the package itself. The faster you are done with an interaction the better the affordance is likely to be and vice versa. Nearing the end of first half of the class we discussed real, perceived, material, false and hidden affordances. Being from interaction design i had the concepts of these already learnt however within today’s class the concepts got a little more clear. There is not much i know from the second half of the class since my light went however i would like to add that since i am an interaction student i already have some level of understanding when it comes to affordances, so every part of the lecture i sat through, i understood.