Affordance

Affordance describes an object or space in terms of the actions made possible for the human in the meeting of a design (or non-design) of anything. Affordance is a key concept across all scales of design, as it allows us to not only understand a site, structure, or object in terms of its physical, aesthetical, and material, properties but how these relate to the abilities of humans or animals and their opportunities for actions. For an object “to be graspable, an object must have opposite surfaces separated by a distance less than the span of the hand.” (Gibson, 1979, p 133). In that way, affordances seek to capture the possible relation, the complementarity of the objects or environments properties and the human’s abilities and intent.