In  A Tale of Two Kitties (my last post), I shared my current working definition of affordance: “an action possibility available to an agent within an environment.”

This doesn’t deviate radically from other definitions, but it does explicitly identify the three most salient aspects of the concept as it pertains to creating sustained change. An affordance offers or suggest a possible action that an agent—you or I—might take within an environment.

Affordances are like obstacles in that it is an agent with a goal or a desired outcome, preferably both, who interprets something in the environment as either an affordance or an obstacle. A boulder in the middle of a road is just a boulder in the middle of a road. It isn’t an obstacle unless there’s something you really, really want on the other side of it.

Similarly, a fitness center located across the street from where you live is simply one of several businesses in the area unless you have a strong desire to increase your own fitness or level of vitality, in which case you identify it as an affordance. (If it’s occupying the space where you want to establish a hair salon, well then it’s an obstacle.)

Many people find affordances difficult to understand because they are relationships, not properties. —Don Norman, researcher, professor, author

Affordances, like obstacles, are interpreted as such by your brain and brought to your attention based on their salience (importance) to you. If you get hungry while on a long drive, food becomes salient, and restaurants you might otherwise ignore become affordances. After you’ve eaten and are no longer hungry, food becomes less salient, and restaurants—if you even notice them—are once more just restaurants. But salience isn’t only based on your immediate internal state or external conditions/circumstances.

It’s (Always) All about the Action

The nature of reality is that everything everywhere is in motion all the time, everything is a process, and everything is an interpretation. The brain continuously interprets both internal and external sensory data in order to determine what action to take next. It bases its interpretations on our mental model of the world, which it has built up over our lifetime largely as a result of our actions—especially the actions we repeat.

Let’s say you regularly frequent a chain of coffee shops, such as Starbucks. Maybe you’re particularly fond of iced vanilla lattes. And maybe the coffee shops are also places where you get together with friends or groups. (When I was in various writers’ groups, we tended to hold our meetings in either bookstores or coffee shops.) Repeatedly spending time in Starbucks increases its salience. It’s an affordance that offers you the possible actions of getting the coffee you enjoy or meeting and connecting with other people.

So you are much more likely to notice a Starbucks—and by “you,” I mean your brain—and its potential affordances than someone for whom Starbucks doesn’t have the same importance. Your brain has paid attention to your repeated past actions, and as a result, it focuses your attention on current or future possibilities for action in your environment by identifying affordances.

I like to use the image of an infinity loop to distinguish between “you” (the agent) and “not you” (your environment) to illustrate the dynamic and ongoing engagement between you and your environment.

Each of us is engaged in this continuous interaction; it’s anything but static. But our tendency to perceive the world as being far more fixed than it is prevents us from being attuned to the dynamic nature of our relationship with the world and can easily blind us to the possibilities—both positive and negative—within it.

Everything Is an Interpretation

The affordances described here and in my previous post are generally positive. But in and of themselves, affordances are neither positive nor negative. Given that they describe relationships, they can not only be interpreted differently by different people, they can also be interpreted differently by the same person at different times or in different circumstances. While a smartphone, for example, offers access (to others, to information, to assistance, etc.), it can also offer unlimited distractions that may provide immediate gratification but divert you from more substantive or satisfying activities.

But maybe, in the moment, a distraction is what you want (say, cat videos or a game) while you’re waiting to board your plane or for a friend to show up. Or maybe you need to get your car towed. Or you want to find out if the yarn store has the specialty yarn you need to complete an important knitting project. A smartphone can help you get what you really want (a desired outcome) or it can get in the way of you getting what you want. That knitting project won’t complete itself while you’re playing Wordle.

A purse left unattended in a shopping cart suggests an action to a thief—or a would-be thief—that it hopefully doesn’t suggest to you or me.

It Was Never Just about the Butterflies

Lewis Hyde, author of Trickster Makes This World, among many other books, wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times that was published last month. He says:

[O]ne thing I have not yet discarded is the butterfly net. I carry it in part to catch and release the few things I can’t identify on the wing but mostly because of the way it changes the way I walk.…I don’t know if the same is true for birders with their binoculars…but for me, walking with the butterfly net alters my perceptions. It produces a state of mind, a kind of undifferentiated awareness otherwise difficult to attain. It is a puzzle to me why this is the case, why, that is, I can’t simply learn from walking with the net and then put it away and transfer what I know to walking without it.

Perhaps it has to do with the way the net declares my intention, which is to apprehend what is in front of me. Walking with the net is like reading with a pencil in hand. The pencil means you want to catch the sense of what you are reading. You intend to underline, put check marks and exclamation points in the margin and make the book your own. You may think you can read with the same quality of attention while lying in bed at night without a pencil, but you can’t. The mind notices your posture and models itself accordingly.

The butterfly net, when used intentionally to generate a specific state of awareness—and likewise the binoculars around one’s neck or the pencil (in my case, pen, highlighter, and Post-It® flags)—are what I call contrivances. Contrivances are affordances—generally positive in nature. Next time I’ll describe the three different types of affordances and where contrivances fit into that scheme.