The evolution of affordance in digital artefacts: a case study on a music CD and music streaming services

In the last decades, the concept of artefact has faced a great evolution since digitization has led to the need of a categorization of artefacts that could properly include digital products and digital services, which, differently from traditional artefacts, also include a digital component. Affordance, born in the 70’s, has often been characterized by ambiguity and confusion in the literature. One of the main reasons are the countless definitions provided over the years. Despite being relatively new concepts, the notions of affordance and digital affordance can be used to define a new approach to the design process. Affordances in a digital system are multiple and connected. They can be classified into two categories: sensory affordances and experiential affordances. The former arise through sensory perceptions, manifesting themselves before an action is undertaken and suggesting to the actor which action to undertake. Instead, the latter arise during the artefact’s usage and can intervene in future actions. The present work starts with a literature review and summarizes the previous works on the topic. Starting from the concepts of artefacts and their classification, we derived the concept of digital affordance. The thesis work aims to validate the previously defined model for the design of digital artefacts using affordances, trying to analyze how the model can be applied to different categories of artefacts. In particular, the validation is performed through the application of the model to a case study that compares two different artefacts: digital products, represented by music CDs and digital services, represented by Streaming Services. The analysis aims to understand whether the categories used to categorize affordance indicators can be uniquely associated with one of the two clusters of affordances: sensory or experiential. Furthermore, it is also analyzed how the presence of experiential and sensory affordances changes when dealing with different types of digital artefacts.