I never wanted to be too broad with these blog posts, but I don’t really know where to start with my interest in affordances and constraints. Everything about this is so interesting. I love discussing and thinking about what the ‘perceived affordances’ (Norman, 1999) of a product were, and comparing them to what we actually use the product for. I find the idea of constraints so fascinating, how the semantics of an object or design are always teaching us how to use other objects. These are obviously not new concepts to my brain. I have always known that a chair can be thrown, sat on, stood on and flipped, but the psychology of it and the constraints of a chair are having scholarly terms and being something we study is really exciting to me!
I’ve now started thinking about how these ideas of affordances and constraints relate to social media and technology as a whole. I’ve loved reading about the history of programs, and how in the early days of computers, there were lots of constraints that disrupted user-use. Programs were being created with an expected programmer level of computer knowledge, rather than being user-experience forward (Norman, 1999). This reminded me of the transition between Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, and how the change brought a focus on user-creation and friendliness.
With my relatively amateur understanding, Instagram seems to push on user-focus affordances. While the original intention of Instagram seems to have been a relatively small scale image sharing service, mainly between your friends and followers, the platform has grown to push for posts reaching for the hundreds of thousands of likes, with a focus on hashtagging and appealing to the larger demographic. While that might not be correct or true, this idea of affordances and constraints is really interesting, and a little birdy told me it will be S U P E R helpful later in the semester.
(Seth Keen is a little birdy)
Norman, D 1999, ‘Affordance, conventions and design (Part 2)’, Nielsen Norman Group, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html