Weekly Project: Tools and Uses: Elaboration into Affordances

This project will see you elaborate on your Week 3 project, “Tool, Purpose, Use,” using the understanding of the theory of affordances.

DIRECTIONS: Re-read your submission for the third Weekly Project, on Tool, Purpose, and Use.

Part One: Using your same chosen tool, convert your list of “purposes” and “uses” into a list of the artifact’s affordances. (To review the theory of affordances, you can re-read Gibson in pages 153 – 158 of our course reader.) Also consider the formula I presented in our 10/28 meeting:

An object’s or material’s affordances are the verbs an individual can do on/with/to/for it, in a given situation.

It is helpful to phrase your affordance using the word “able” as a verb, prefix, or suffix, or the adjective useful followed by a gerund (-ing form verb).

For example, consider the statement, “a pencil can be used to stab something.” To emphasize affordances, you can say the pencil is:
able to stab through a soft-enough surface
useful for stabbing
stab-with-able

IN SHORT: Part One of this assignment, come up with as long a list as possible of affordances for your object. Consider both the object’s intended purposes, as well as the non-prescribed or non-normative uses you devised in your previous assignment.

Part Two: Start by considering, again, my formulation of Gibson’s concept of affordance:

An object’s or material’s affordances are the verbs an individual can do on/with/to/for it, in a given situation.

For example, the statement, “a pencil can be used to stab something” presumes a certain kind of individual as its subject: an individual with a prehensile hand or limb, one that can grasp the pencil and move it forcefully towards the thing it means to stab.

(Note that thinking this way reveals another affordance of the pencil: it is graspable. Any new affordances that you notice during this process, add to your Part One list.)

The statement also presumes a certain kind of situation. In this case, it presumes an object weak enough for the pencil to pierce or damage it. A pencil can puncture a piece of paper, but not a thick layer of stainless steel.

Affordances are thus, as Gibson notes, relative to an individual organism. A lily pad affords bodily support for a frog, but not for a human being.

Human-made artifacts, which are meant to afford certain possibilities to their human users, always have a particular kind of individual in mind. Many artifacts are designed with the idea that most humans can use them. But humans are vastly varied in our body types and in our physical and mental capacities. We differ not only from one another, but from ourselves, over the course of a lifetime: what is graspable for you as an adult was not when you were a 6-month-old baby; what you can grasp today, you may not be able to grasp so easily if you develop arthritis in your 70s or 80s. People who use prosthetic limbs often have different modes of grasping objects, and objects thus have different affordances relative to them. To ask about tools and their affordances is also to ask, as Sarah Henderen does in pages 131-142 of our reader, “Who is the Build Environment Built For?”

Part Two asks you to consider fully the individuals implied in your list of affordances from part one. What sorts of individuals does your list of affordances presume? What ages, body types, or capacities? Are any non-human animals able to make use of any of the affordances you list? Are your affordances specific to any situations, or require the object of your action (the thing, say, the pencil stabs) to have certain affordances in themselves? Are there ways humans go out of their way to inventively adapt to the limitations of your tools? Write at least 300 words. Your prose can be casual, in a “thinking-aloud” sort of style–just try to consider the object from as many different angles as you can.

Part Three: Think of a machine that is distinct from the tool you described above. (Consider the differences between tool and machine we discussed in class, and in Mumford, pages 213-216 of the reader.) Write at least 200 words on the affordances of that machine and the individuals for whom the machine is designed. What is different about determining the affordances of a tool, versus a machine? You may consider not just tools meant for “everyone,” but specialized equipment requiring certain less-than-typical capacities and skills. Or you may consider everyday machines related to communications, the home, transportation, or entertainment.

Since this is posted late, you have an extra day: please upload to your google folder by 11:59 PM on Wednesday, November 5th.