Emerging approaches to research and design practice

XV.6 November + December 2008
Page: 18
Digital Citation

THE WAY I SEE ITSignifiers, not affordances


Authors:
Donald Norman

It's time for a review. As times and technologies change, as we have moved from individual to group, social, and even cultural computing, and as communication technologies have become as important as computational ones, how well have our design principles kept up? One of our fundamental principles is that of perceived affordances: how we know what to do in novel situations. That's fine for objects, but what about situations? What about people, social groups, cultures? The answer is the same, yet different. Yes, there are still perceived affordances, constraints, and conceptual models, but there's more. There are trails. There…




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