The document discusses the concept of affordances and how they relate to hypermedia. It profiles several theorists who contributed to our understanding of affordances, including James Gibson who coined the term affordance, Donald Norman who applied it to product design, and Roy Fielding who related it to hypermedia and REST. The document also references the work of Alfred Korzybski and how language relates to our perception of the world. Overall it explores how a rich set of affordances allows users to discover new possibilities in a hypermedia system beyond what designers may have envisioned.

1. “Such a rich set of affordances”
- A Hypermedia Tale
 Mike Amundsen
Principal API Architect
@mamund
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2. “Improve the quality and usability of
information on the Web.”
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3. “Help people build great APIs.”
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4. “Hypermedia Junkie.”
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10. James J. Gibson
 “The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception” (1986)
 Coined the term “affordance”
 Environments provide niches of appropriate affordances
 Animals survive/thrive when they can exploit the affordances in their niche
“An affordance is a quality of an object, or an environment, which allows an
individual to perform an action.”
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14. Donald A. Norman
 “The Design of Everyday Things” (1988)
 “In the Head” and “In the World”
 Seven Stages of Action / Action Lifecycle
 Helps establish the field of HCI (Human-Computer Interaction)
“The value of a well-designed object is when it has such a rich set of affordances
that the people who use it could do things that the designer never imagined.”
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19. Roy T. Fielding
 “Architectural Styles and Design of Network-Based Software Architectures” (2001)
 Relying upon “Representation” and “Hypermedia”
 Inventor of “REST” style
 Transfer “State”, not “Objects”
“The information becomes the affordance through which the user obtains
choices and selects actions.”
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22. Alfred H. S. Korzybski
 “Science and Sanity” (1933)
 Coined the phrase “The map is not the territory”
 We experience the world only indirectly; via our language and its abstractions
 Humans are “time-binders”
“The only possible link between the objective world and the linguistic world is
found in structure and structure alone.”
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32. “Such a rich set of affordances”
- A Hypermedia Tale
 Story by Mike Amundsen
 Art by Dana Amundsen
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