5Interfaces and affordances
Design is increasingly part of the modus of social science and humanities disciplines, including communication and new media studies. On the surface, the fit appears straightforward. Design, like many interpretive fields, is deeply interested in the status of the human. It adopts and extends holistic methods like ethnography and phenomenological analysis to make sense of how humans and built and natural environments fit together. Equally, design can act as a ‘third way’ (Nelson & Stolterman, 2012), a go-between for interpretivist and pragmatic positions in the study of human society. For communication and new media studies in particular, disciplines in which ...
