The concept of Affordance was first coined in 1966 by the American psychologist James Jerome Gibson (1904-1979) as part of his Theory of Affordances.
He describes them in his book, ‘The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception’ (1979) as:
“The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill …” (p.127)
Further, he describes them as being ‘action possibilities’ within the environment, in other words things that could happen within a given space specifically because aspects of that space allows for the possibility of those things to happen. This is true whether those affordances are deliberatly provided or they are simply inherent in the space.
For example, a play setting that provides a slide is providing a deliberate affordance that gives children the opportunity to slide; a naturally occurring slope in an outside space might also provide the opportunity to slide even if, and this is an important point, even if that slope was not provided as a place to slide down.
This is so because what the environment offers an individual in terms of what they could do with an affordance is not necessarily what they should or will do with it. This partly explains why there is sometimes a disconnect between what adults think children will do with a particular affordance and what children actually do with it.
What connection there is between what an affordance offers and how it might be used are dependent on how it is perceived by the individual based largely on their previous experiences. For example, a pile of carboard boxes might suggest to one person the possibility of building a ‘robot’; for another it might be saying ‘spaceship’, or ‘house’, or even ‘place to hide’.
The point being that an affordance might be deliberate or accidental and contains multiple possibilities that are brought to life by the person interacting with them.
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See also J.J. Gibson, Afforded Space, and Possibilities (coming soon).
