How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things
How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things
Davis, J 2020, How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Technologies are intrinsically social. They reflect human values and affect human behavior. The social dynamics of technology materialize through design features that shape how a technology functions and to what effect. The shaping effects of technology are represented in scholarly fields by the concept of “affordances.”Affordances are the ways design features enable and constrain user engagement and social action. This has been a central construct for designers and technology theorists since foundational statements on the topic from JJ Gibson and Donald Norman in the 1970s and 80s. With the rise of digitization and widespread automation, “affordance” has entered common parlance and resurged within academic discourse and debate.This book provides a conceptual update on affordance theory along with a cogent scaffold that shifts the key question in affordance analysis from what technologies afford to how technologies afford, for whom, and under what circumstances?“How Artifacts Afford” introduces the mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances in which technologies request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow social action, varying across subjects and circumstances. Underlying the mechanisms and conditions framework is a sharp focus on politics and power encoded in sociotechnical systems.The work brings clarity to the affordance concept, situates the concept within a broader history of technology studies, and demonstrates how the mechanisms and conditions framework can serve as a transferrable tool of inquiry, critique, and (re)design.