Affordance Theory

Affordance Theory, developed by psychologist James Gibson in 1979, is the claim that the environment presents possibilities for action — affordances — that are directly perceivable without the mediation of internal representations or inferential processes. An affordance is not a property of the object alone nor of the organism alone, but a relation between the two: a step affords climbing to a child but not to an adult, a handle affords grasping to a human hand but not to a paw. The theory has been widely adopted in interaction design and human-computer interaction as a framework for understanding how interface elements communicate their function through form, though critics argue that digital affordances are not genuinely Gibsonian because they lack the physical reciprocity between organism and environment.