Week 4 / Third Lecture: Understanding and conceptualizing interaction [Amirali]

this week topic is affordance, which I find it quiet interesting. Affordance is defined in Wikipedia as a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an individual to perform an action. For example, a knob affords twisting, and perhaps pushing, while a cord affords pulling. The term is used in a variety of fields: perceptual psychology, cognitive psychology, environmental psychology, industrial design, human–computer interaction (HCI), interaction design, instructional design and artificial intelligence.

The word "affordance" was originally invented by the perceptual psychologist J. J. Gibson (1977, 1979) to refer to the actionable properties between the world and an actor (a person or animal). To Gibson, affordances are a relationship. They are a part of nature: they do not have to be visible, known, or desirable. Some affordances are yet to be discovered. Some are dangerous. I suspect that none of us know all the affordances of even everyday objects.

A graphical user interface allows a user to interact with a computer without entering code. The combination of an input device (such as a mouse or stylus) and visual representations of the workspace and tasks, the user is able to interact with the computer in a manner similar to the physical manipulations available in the real world Source: http://www.motive.co.nz/glossary/gui.php