Four Affordances

Everything made of electronic bits is potentially:

  • procedural (composed of executable rules)
  • participatory (inviting human action and manipulation of the represented world)
  • encyclopedic (containing very high capacity of information in multiple media formats)
  • spatial (navigable as an information repository and/or a virtual place)
These affordances  make up the designer’s palette for representation in any digital format or genre.  Inventing the Medium  offers a methodology and principles of design for the collective effort of maximizing the expressive power of each of these affordances.

7 responses to “Four Affordances”

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  3. Andrew Quitmeyer | February 2, 2014 at 3:15 pm | Reply

    Under Participatory, I personally feel that we could change “human action” to something more abstract like “organismal action” or just “directed action,” in order to address when we need to make digital participatory devices that interact with animals, other living creatures, or even robots. Otherwise we are leaving out all kinds of weird rich new fields like biotic-interaction or Robot-Robot interaction. 🙂

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