Affordances as a concept originally comes from cognitive psychology and James Gibson (2015 [1979]). He was primarily interested in investigating what stages people learn to use what he called “action possibilities” of their environment. In the late 1980s, however, Donald Norman (1988) brought the term into human-machine interaction and added a design twist on Gibson’s original theory. Norman felt that Gibson assumed there were too many open possibilities in how objects in the environment could be used. The original theory didn’t take into account the way objects themselves encouraged some sorts of uses over others. His was an ecological approach, which could easily swing us into actor-network theory territory…but I won’t go there right now. Later William Gaver (1991) extended Norman’s approach to explain three different types of affordances: Perceptible, Hidden, and False. Perceptible affordances are, put bluntly, that objects do what it looks like they should be able to do. Hidden affordances are uses that are not apparent, while false affordances are those uses objects look like they should be able to do but don’t.