In 1977, social psychologist James Gibson coined the term “affordance” to denote “action possibilities provided to the actor by the environment”.[2] A decade later, Donald Norman introduced affordances to the field of object design in his well-known book The Psychology of Everyday Things (1988), after which the concept quickly made its way into all corners of the humanities and social sciences, including the study of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI).

"potentiality" (to graft a concept by Anton Chekov from a literary to a technical context). This is the idea that within the use of every technical tool there is more than just the consciousness of that tool, there is also the possibility to spark something beyond those predefined use