I am now reading a very important new book that addresses a number of
issues that have been raised on this forum.

Davis, J. L. (2020). How artifacts afford: the power and politics of
everyday things. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.


Jenny first announced the publication on this forum. The abstract intrigued
me enough that I bought the book. And although I consider myself an
authority on the concept of "Affordance" (having argued with J.J. Gibson
about it at length), I discovered how much I didn't know.

Jenny adds a rich analysis to the conventional treatment of affordances,
adding their presumed meaning (their ontology)  coupled with an analysis
from speech acts, and various social and societal perspectives. She shows
that affordances are far more important than even I had believed.

Affordances alone have limited value. To understand their power, we need to
couple affordances with the notion of Speech acts which discusses how we
come to interpret a statement as a request, an order, an imperative, or a
question, etc., but we then must generalize speech acts from verbal
utterances to our interpretation of objects and artifacts.  And social
norms. And agency.  Does the fence have agency in stopping behavior? No,
but the maker of the fence did have agency in designing something which had
the intended meaning.

"Speech Acts" come from the philosopher's John Austin and John Searle (I
prefer Searle because, as Wikipedia says "whereas Austin emphasized the
conventional interpretation of speech acts, Searle emphasized a
psychological interpretation (based on beliefs, intentions, etc.). You can
read Wikipedia on Speech acts or if you want to read more than you need to
know. read Speech Acts in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy).

To give you an example, affordances do not just make some actions possible
and some either difficult or impossible, but they do so in a graded,
class-conscious manner that varies across situations and cultures. (In what
follows the ideas come from Jenny', but the wording is my interpretation.)

A rope fence is a message saying "please do not cross." Note the "please."
This is a speech act request. An electrified fence at one level has the
same affordance as the rope fence of prohibiting travel, but it does so in
a loud, stern, frightening voice: "You are not permitted to proceed under
penalty of death."

And here is where social and environmental factors come in. If I were a
bank robber, I would take the electrified fence as a challenge, not as a
prohibition.

Or, what if you cannot tell if the fence is electrified -- although it has
the same affordance (or what I call an anti-affordance -- prohibit some
behavior), it won't stop the unwanted behavior if people don't know it is
electrified. It's like the Doomsday bomb, designed to wipe out all
civilization if it ever detects a nuclear explosion, and therefore a clever
way to stop all nucelar explosions. But it doesn't work if other nations do
not know it exists.

Or what if there is a sign warning of the electrified fence, but it is not
actually electrified. The behavior is exactly as if the anti-affordance
were true.

I passed a church early this morning on my exercise walk (on paths and at a
time when other people were not around).  The church used to have a rope
fence (a single strand of rope) to suggest politely to people they should
not use their parking lot as a shortcut to the trail through the woods
(which was where I was going). Today, the rope had been replaced by a
single strand of a metal chain link, fastened at both end with padlocks.
The affordances of both the single strand of rope and the single strand of
chain were very similar: both were trivially easy to duck under and
proceed.  But I interpreted the rope as a polite request and the chain as a
somewhat more insistent one, not just "please do not enter, " but as "We
really mean it. So, please, do not cut across the parking lot."


Read the book.   Easy to read, but showing that no concept -- especially
not affordances -- can be understood in isolation. To understand the true
ower of affordances you have to consider the environment the context, the
cultural expectations and norms. Ontologies and speech acts.

Can affordances be racists?  Yup.  Well, no, the affordance has no belief
system, no agency. So something like a fence, by itself, can't be racist.
But the intentions of those who put up the fence as a way of regulating
behavior could very well have had a racist intention. And depending upon
the cultural norms of the community, it could very well have been a racist
act. So in everyday, informal (and imprecise) language, it might very well
be OK to call the fence a racist.

Read the book.

Don




-- 

My articles and videos: https://jnd.org.

UC San Diego Design Lab: https://designlab.ucsd.edu
Future of Design Education: https://FutureOfDesignEducation.org


Don Norman, UC San Diego
Distinguished Prof (emeritus) and Director, Design Lab
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Executive Assistant:
Olga McConnell, [log in to unmask]


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