This week we looked at ‘affordances’. Whilst I felt I had a pretty good hold on the concept prior to this week, I learnt that are many more facets that make up the concept. In combination of the lecture, tutorial and readings, I acquired knowledge on affordances, perceived affordances and constraints. I’m now in the process of integrating this knowledge with the operation of Instagram.

What I found to be interesting is that affordances seems simple in some ways. Such as that it can be defined using few words; ‘the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used’ (Norman 1988, p9). Or that when applied to simple objects such as a water bottle, it makes sense. Identifying uses for an object can be easy but I found that when the four kinds of constraints were introduced, the concept became a lot more involved. I now have to consider that ‘affordances suggest the range of possibilities, constraints limit the number of alternatives’ (Norman 1988, p82). The four constraints are physical, semantic, cultural and logical. They each have a role in guiding someone who is interacting with an object to be more likely to perform one action over another. There are stand alone objects such as a water bottle that have a smaller pool of possible uses. But then there’s Instagram which has a much larger pool. What I find to be important to Instagram and its affordances is that it is on the internet. So for someone to understand the affordances of Instagram, would someone need to first understand the affordances of the internet?

With Instagram constantly increasing its capabilities, methods of sharing is straying away from the original purpose of sharing photos and videos. For example, Instagram now allows video chats. This is purely a communicative function so I wonder what place it has on Instagram. To new users however I think that the toolbar at the bottom of the app is indicative of the platform’s purpose. That you can look at posts from who you follow, discover more posts that have been shared by other people, keep tabs on who is engaging with your posts and then being able to look at how your Instagram is viewed by everyone else. So this week I want to continue in understanding Instagram’s purpose and in turn, what the app affords. I think that this week has been very useful in guiding how I should look at Instagram. So I think I might go on Instagram after finishing this and do a bit of investigation into how people engage with the app. Because whilst I engage with accounts that target my demographic, I wonder if Instagram has other performative functions to other demographics. Or if the nature of an account such as if it’s a person’s personal account or a professional one makes a difference to the experience too.

Reference:

Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things , Basic Book, New York (pp. vii-186).

Photo Credit:

https://www.instagram.com