8 August

James Gibson noticed that the things in our environments have meanings. Normally we say that only humans deal with meaning and purpose. Every object or technology has what he called affordances, ways in which the thing is supposed to be used and which restricts and enables at the same time. For example a person without hands or fingers can’t use a tea cup very easily, and the handle on the cup is specifically designed for the fingers of a human hand - that’s part of the cup’s affordances. The tennis racket here shows that sometimes the affordances are richer than the traditional use of the thing. The affordances aren’t ‘in’ in the object or thing, the meaning and purpose of each thing comes from its context of use. Objects and technologies are part of an ecological, social context, they’re not separate ‘things’. Sometimes TV shows play on this when they give people an old object whose context is now no longer there, and ask them to guess what it was used for. Normally they can’t.