Automate, informate, and generate: affordance primitives of smart devices and the Internet of Things
Stefan Seidel, Nicholas Berente · Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2020
“Smart” devices—physical products with embedded digital capabilities—are fundamentally reshaping the way that many firms, industries, and ecosystems organize. This chapter explores how smart devices, if interconnected to build flexible systems, impact firm processes in ways that are different from previous generations of information technologies. The authors describe the “affordance primitives” of smart devices in terms of sensing, storing, processing, connecting, and actuating. They explain how these very basic action potentials of smart devices allow for “process level affordances” in terms of informating, automating, and generating, resulting in an evolving set of outcomes that could culminate in emergent, self-organizing processes.