# Affordances, Signifiers & Feedback

**Track:** Principles of Good Design — Design & Human-Centered Design — proposed (25)
**Framework / surface:** design
**Level:** Intermediate
**Prerequisites:** What Design Is

**In one line:** Don Norman’s interaction principles: affordances, signifiers, feedback, mapping, constraints.

## Theory, aesthetics & inspiration

An object should explain itself. Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things — first published in 1988 as The Psychology of Everyday Things and revised in 2013 — argues that good design narrows two gaps: the gulf of execution, between intention and action, and the gulf of evaluation, between a system's state and our reading of it. He borrowed affordance from perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson, whose 1979 ecological theory named the action possibilities an environment offers; Norman later split off the signifier, the perceptible cue that advertises an affordance. Natural mapping ties control to effect spatially, constraints rule out error, and feedback confirms it. Today Google's Material Design 3 encodes these signifiers and feedback states as reusable components.

## References

- [The Design of Everyday Things](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Design_of_Everyday_Things)
- [Affordances — Interaction Design Foundation](https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/topics/affordances)
- [States — Material Design 3](https://m3.material.io/foundations/interaction/states/overview)