CONCEPT
Affordances
The actionable properties of an object as perceived by a user — what the thing permits you to do — borrowed from Gibson, refined by Norman, and rendered newly problematic by an AI interface whose action space is unbounded and invisible.
An affordance is a relationship between an object's properties and the capabilities of the agent encountering it. A flat, rigid, knee-high surface affords sitting. A graspable, throwable object affords throwing. The affordance exists as a relationship whether or not anyone perceives it, but it becomes actionable only when perceived. Norman adapted Gibson's ecological concept for design by adding a crucial distinction: affordances can exist without their perceptual cues, and perceptual cues can exist without underlying affordances. The well-designed artifact aligns what it permits with what it advertises. The natural language interface, as the Norman volume argues, violates this alignment at a structural level — offering unbounded capabilities behind a blank text field that signals none of them.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Norman imported affordances from James Gibson's ecological psychology, where the term described the meaningful possibilities of action that an environment offers to an organism. In Norman's hands, the concept became a design