Affordances
I was tracking down the definition (and etymology) of the term “affordance” for a presentation I’m working on. For some reason, my Mac’s built-in dictionary doesn’t know about the term and I wanted to ensure that is wasn’t a neologism that had erroneously crept into my vocabulary.
I managed to track down Don Norman’s essay on Affordance and Design in which he explains how, in The Psychology of Everyday Things, he appropriated the term from James Gibson’s earlier work. (Wikipedia tells much the same story, but without Norman’s flare.)
A bit more poking reveals that Norman will be talking in mid-October at the Franklin Institute in Phildelphia. Interesting.