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affordance: the relationship between an object and a personanti-affordanceperceived affordance

signifier: communication devicesconfusing signifier

Two of the most important characteristics of good desing are discoverability and understanding

Industrial design, interaction design, experience design, human-centerd design(HCD)

The moral was simple: we were desingning things for people, so we needed to understand both technology and people.

Good design starts with an understanding of psychology and technology. Good design requires good communication,especially from machine to person, indicating what acgions are posible, what ishappening, and waht is about to happen.

Getting the specification of the thing to be degined is one of the most difficult parts of the design,so much so that the HCD principle is to avoid specifying the problem as long aspossible but instead to iterate uponrepeated approximations.

Discoverability: affordances, signifiers, constraints, mappings, and feedback.Affordance refers to the relationship between a physical object and a person. A

n affordance is a relationship betweenthe properties of an object and the capabilities of the agent that determine just how the object could possibly be used.

-> anti-affordance: the prevention of interaction.Affordances exist even if they are not visible. For designers, their visibility

is critical: visible affordances providestrong clues to the operations of things. Perceived affordances help people figure out what actions are possible withoutthe need for labels or instructions => the signaling component of affordances signifiers.

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties.

Affordances determine what actions are possible. Signifiers communicate where t

he action should take place.What people need, and what desigers must provide, are signifiers. Good design requires, among other things, goodcommunication of the purpose, structure, and operation of the device to the people who use it.

Affordance to use in design in a manner somewhat different than its inventor had intended, I use signifier in a somewhatdifferent way than it is used semiotics. The term signifier refers to any mark or sound, any perceivable indicator thatcommunicates appropriate behavior to a person.

Signifiers can be deliberate and intenetional, but they may also be accidentaland unintentional.

Whatever their nature, planned or accidental, signifiers provide valuable clues

as to the nature of the world andof social activities.

SUMMARY OF AFFORDANCE AND SIGNIFIER Affordances are the possible interactions between people and the environment. some affordances are preceivable,others are not.

Perceived affordances often act as signifiers, but they can be ambiguous.Signifiers signal things, in particular what actions are possible and how they

should be one. Signifiers must be

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perceivable, else they fail to fucntion.