Technology Affordances & Disaffordances
Technology Affordances & Disaffordances in Digital Workplace Tech
Jeff Merrell is a professor at Northwestern whose course “Creating and Sharing Knowledge” asks students to consider how technology is experienced/perceived differently by different types of people (and therefore privileges some types of people over others).
The concept draws from Sasha Costanza-Chock’s book Design Justice - Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. One of Constanza-Chock’s central arguments is against design’s “bias toward a universal user or participant, but see the world through an intersectional lens, where race, class, gender and other factors combine to systematically oppress different communities of people”.
Typically, we assess the quality of a technology (like a digital platform or physical technology (like a cell phone)) based on its features and functions, or “what it does”.
Academics including Merrell, Costanza-Chock, and Mao/Andrea are supporters of assessing the quality of a technology according to its affordances or “what results when the technology is used by a particular type of person or particular organizational context" or put more precisely (and jargony), “the ways the technology becomes mutually constituted with the organizational context in which it is embedded” (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).
What is affordance?
Affordances include visibility, persistence, edibility, association (people-to-people, people-to-content), and anonymity. Again, it’s not a property or way to describe a technology. Instead, affordance describes the relationship between the user and the technology. You could also say that an affordance is the “universe” of potential actions a person might take with an object.
To give an example of affordances in action, I’ll share my own perceived affordances of Twitter. It is:
Highly visible (my account is public)
Highly persistent (my posts last forever)
Somewhat-editable (I can only edit tweets for 30 mins)
Highly associative (I can easily connect with other users and content)
and not very anonymous (my handle is @kaylauevans).
Perception vs. Reality
Original definitions of affordance referred to the properties/features of a technology (which more recent have scholars named “signifiers”).
“In contrast, Norman (1990) emphasizes the notion of perceived affordances, which refers to users’ subjective evaluations of the action possibilities enabled by technology. This perceptual-oriented approach to examining channel affordances has been endorsed by many communication scholars (e.g., Evans, Pearce, Vitak, & Treem, 2017; Faraj & Azad, 2012; Gibbs, Rozaidi, & Eisenberg, 2013) because it recognizes that people can perceive the same technology differently, and, as a result, interact or be affected by the technology differently (yet in ways that can be systematically understood). In this study, we examine how differences in the perceived anonymity and visibility of a voicing channel affect important antecedents (i.e., safety and efficacy) of prohibitive voicing intentions.
This means that two factors go into affordance:
How a particular person perceives a technology
How a technology is designed (which, in turn, informs how a person might perceive it)
This means that if we are to design technology in a way that’s accessible to everyone… its design must take into account differences in perception - in the same way that UIs are designed to accommodate differences in vision (e.g. blindness, colorblindness, nearsightedness).
Thanks for reading! - Kayla