How something looks gives us cues as to how it behaves and how we should interact with it. The size, shape, and even weight of mobile devices let us know that they should be carried with us. The sleek black or silver look of digital video recorders like TiVo devices tells us that they are pieces of electronic equipment and belong alongside stereos and televisions.
Appearance is one major source(texture is the other) of what cognitive psychologist James Gibson, in 1966, called affordance. Gibson exploded the concept more fully in his 1979 book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, but it wasn't until Don Norman's seminal book The Psychology of Everyday Things, in 1988, that the term spread into design. An affordance is a property, or multiple properties, of an object or with a featu... (查看原文)
