Reflecting on Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept

After reading Affordances: Clarifying and Evolving a Concept, I feel a slightly heightened sense of design and visual communication in regards to affordances and functionality. I am not claiming to have become an expert in the field of interface design after this reading, but I have noticed myself looking more closely at interfaces I encounter on a daily basis, and question whether the affordance is a successful design in that it achieves the fundamental properties of an affordance. However, I will admit that this article seemed a little confusing at first, as I've never had any experience with interface design; then I came across the sentence in this article that caught my attention most that stated "Although complex things may require supporting information, simple things should not. If they do, then design has failed." This may just sound like common sense, it really helped me put the reading into perspective. While I found the entire passage very helpful, I have to say that I agree with Norman's views on affordances over Gibson's, as Gibson's do not consider the grey areas that sometimes need to be considered.