Abstract
This article suggests employing the affordance concept, the role concept, and the script concept in a complementary manner as analytical tools for investigating artefact-user interaction at three different levels of stability, abstraction, and interrelatedness. It argues that the affordance concept is best suited to describing general possibilities for action constituted by common technical features in combination with common taken-for-granted knowledge of how to use them. The script concept, in contrast, is best suited to analysing the most concrete situations of interaction between artefacts and users: those situations in which the interaction is defined by one particular course of action. In between, there is a middle level characterised by artefacts and users being involved in several interrelated activities for which the role concept provides the tools for analysis.
Highlights
The concept of affordance has become popular as a concept for analysing and understanding the interaction between technology and users
Social constructivist approaches such as Pinch and Bijker’s (1987) social construction of technology approach leaned towards social determinism by exclusively focusing on how new technology is shaped by social factors and ignoring how the technology in turn shapes social settings
To describe the heterogeneous ensembles of sociotechnical constellations in a way that considers social and material agency, the authors of actor-network theory (ANT) and related work developed a concept of script and referred to concepts from role theory
Summary
The concept of affordance has become popular as a concept for analysing and understanding the interaction between technology and users. Norman (2002 [1988]) introduced the affordance concept into design studies to refer to the most general and enduring relational properties in the interaction between artefacts and users. Akrich (1992b), Latour (1988) and Callon (1986a) introduced the concepts of script and role into ANT to show how there are no artefact-user relations based on stable properties of humans or nonhuman objects.
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