What is it about?
Using examples from our teaching, we show how to best teach a nuanced understanding of the concept of afordances to undergraduate students. We present insights from teaching Jenny Davis’ affordances framework to over 500 university students within a constructivist/socio-cultural tradition of HCI. Our work shows how to enhance students’ understanding of context-specific analyses of user interfaces, and we specifically advocate for adding user studies early in the educational program. Our aim is to aid the spread of Davis' mechanisms and conditions framework among future HCI professionals. In moving from what an object affords to HOW, to WHOM and under what circumstances an object affords, the framework offers a very insigthful way of integrating theoretical critique and analytical practice amongst students as well as design and HCI professionals
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Why is it important?
It is important because understanding that not all users are the same is a foundational principle in teaching Human-Computer Interaction. Learning to recognize how the diversity of users and their circumstances condition their experience of interacting with computers is essential in educating reflective, effective, and user-centric HCI professionals. Within this field, the term affordance has been a both heralded and contested term for years, but remains important. The Mechanism and Conditions Framework by Jenny Davis productively nuances the term, however, translating the framework into a context of HCI education presents itself with a set of challenges. In this paper, we demonstrate how to do this and offers advice to fellow teachers.
Perspectives
As authors and educators, we are thrilled to have been able to translate our pedagogical strategies as well as experiences from teaching into a paper. We hope that this will make colleagues from other programs all over the world realize the importance of understanding digital technologies in their context. As evidenced in the paper, we find that Davis' way of understanding affordances is far superior to other explanations of the concept as it offers the much needed nuances to socio-cultural and situational aspects of what technology makes possible or difficult, depending on the specific user and use situation.
Lone K Hansen
Aarhus Universitet
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Teaching Affordances: Challenges and Mitigations when integrating the Mechanisms and Conditions framework in HCI, June 2024, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3658619.3658631.
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