Why are affordances important? More questions with Jenny L. Davis
Social psychologist and technology theorist Jenny L. Davis brings clarity to the question with her affordance framework.
This is part of DisAssemble, a biweekly philosophy of tech newsletter aimed at those interested in creating better digital products.
In the last issue of DisAssemble, Jenny L. Davis, a social psychologist and technology theorist, answered questions about what affordances are.
In this second part of my interview with her, we focus on why affordances are important to those involved in designing and building tech.
She recently published the excellent How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things. I strongly recommend you read it - her answers below offer a taste of what it spells out, namely a powerful and unique framework on why and how affordances matter.
So: why should anybody who is involved in building digital products care about learning affordance theory?
The value of affordance, as a concept, is that it accounts for a lively interplay between technical design features and agentic human users, within complex social systems.
It can be easy to fall into technological determinism, on the one hand, and radical constructivism, on the other. These static positions set up an ill-founded debate about the nature of technology in society. The former assumes that technologies have inevitable effects. The latter assumes that technological design is neutral and largely impotent, taking shape only through the people who use the technologies for varied ends. Affordances strike a conceptual between these two extremes.
Those who build digital products would do well to understand how their design features will affect, and be reworked by, the human subjects who encounter them. This facilitates a nuanced and thoughtful approach to design that takes seriously the material elements of design decisions, while respecting and anticipating how those design decisions will function in a diverse and multifaceted social world.
When thinking about digital products, designers, researchers and product people tend to think about the dispositional state of users: needs, challenges, goals, etc. How do internal states of being such as these interact with affordance theory?
Internal states are part of the for whom and under what circumstances question (i.e., the conditions of affordance). We know that technologies don’t afford equally or identically for everyone. Some of that variation will come from extrinsic factors—demographics, familiarity with a product, skillsets etc. Some of that variation will also come from user propensities and dispositions, which may change within a single user over time and/or amid varied contexts. Designing for diverse, socially situated, dynamic subjects means mapping affordances to the interrelation of these extrinsic factors, internal states, and technical design features (hardware, software, interfaces, algorithms etc).
In your book you talk about the ‘mechanisms and conditions framework’, a way of conceptualising how affordances afford. Artifacts, according to the framework, ‘afford’ by requesting, demanding, encouraging, discouraging, refusing, and allowing.
This newsletter has argued that we habituate ourselves around these affording effects, changing the way we act and think. Thus, it can be argued that affordances can co-constitute who we are, meaning that designers are responsible, by proxy, for 'designing' people (as it were), including how they think and what they think about. How would you respond to this assertion?
I agree! (but with anti-determinist caveats). Design is never totalizing. However, technologies certainly do things with people just as people do things with technologies. Technologies both reflect and affect human social values, patterns of behavior, and socio-structural arrangements.
This assumption of sociotechnical co-constitution is central to the mechanisms and conditions framework. Design features not only affect how technologies function, but also how individuals and societies function. For this reason, the work of design carries with it a social responsibility. Designers don’t just make things, they also contribute to the making of people and social structures.
A twofold goal of the mechanisms and conditions framework, which overlays direct and flow-on effects with a simple conceptual scaffold (request, demand, encourage, discourage, refuse, and allow), is to give designers a shared vocabulary with which to articulate how their products will operate, and to empower analysts, activists, and everyday users to specify how feature sets do operate in practice, thus holding developers and producers to account.
People who create digital products are trained for and obliged to design affordances that encourage consumerist behaviours rather than affordances that help users to understand how the socio-technical systems they're a part of operate.
For example, an app will rarely provide affordances to help the user to understand how they themselves might be changing by using that app. How do you think that those who are involved in building digital products can solve this? Or is this an issue that is out of their hands?
The incentive structure in a capitalist system will always work to optimize capital accumulation. The imperatives of capital accumulation are often at odds with what is good for individuals and groups in society. Even when capitalism and social good coincide, this is a flimsy and fleeting happenstance that cannot sustain—as soon as the convergence is unprofitable, it dissipates. For this reason, and because of the social efficacy embodied in technological systems, external regulations, guidelines, and governance bodies are necessary for sustaining socially responsible design.
Individual designers and engineers often care about ethics and social wellbeing. This has become abundantly clear to me while doing fieldwork with practitioners in Australia’s technology start-up sector. Everyone I talk to wants to do good (or at least avoid Evil, to borrow Google’s famous early imperative). An operational affordance framework, coupled with structural regulations and guidelines, can function together to help individual designers thoughtfully consider the social effects of their products.
People often think of regulations as constraining, but in the service of responsible design, rules and mandates can be freeing. If individual designers/engineers want to design ethically, but are pulled by the pressures of capitalist goals, then regulatory structures can alleviate some of the profitability squeeze, giving practitioners a legitimate avenue to resist the worst instincts of the corporate bodies and venture capitalists for whom they work.
We're at a point in history where ethical issues related to technology have perhaps never been more important. From issues ranging from constant surveillance to AI biases, we are inundated with ethical challenges. How does considering affordances, and the mechanism and conditions framework in particular, help us navigate and address these issues?
The mechanisms and conditions framework of affordances operates as a tool of both analysis and (re)design. It offers a shared and accessible vocabulary for analysts to specify how systems socially operate, and for designers to specify the intended outcomes their products will engender.
A common vocabulary that attends to the ways technologies manifest human social values and human social relations grants technologists a way to map their designs through a social lens, anticipate a range of outcomes for diverse social subjects, and identify when and how their systems go awry. Concretely, this means beginning at the end, thinking about how a system requests, demands, encourages, discourages, refuses, and allows a range of social outcomes for diverse social subjects, then working backwards to inbuild the features that will (ostensibly) achieve these goals.
At the same time, the framework creates a foundation for holding technological systems—and the companies that build them—to account. Analysts and activists can point to the ways technologies demand surveillance, refuse access, encourage participation by some while discouraging it by others, and so forth. In this way, the framework empowers non-technologists to articulate the social problems wrought by and through technological systems.
There's so much more to your book than we've been discussing here, but if there was just one technique, tool, or principle you wanted people who create digital products to use, what would it be?
I want the people who create digital products to move beyond universal subjects and oversimplified use environments. This is not a new idea, but an idea that often loses traction in practice. The mechanisms and conditions framework may help keep this ideal on the ground by providing a simple scaffold for thinking about, and creating for, diverse, multifaceted, and socially situated populations.
No product will serve everyone equally or identically. By specifying, in the first instance, how, for whom, and under what circumstances, programmers, engineers, and designers of all sorts can intentionally map their products and once deployed, evaluate, adjust, or when necessary, dismantle their creations.
Thanks again Jenny for these hugely valuable insights! Tech people are sorely missing a framework that gives this kind of bilateral recognition of both the features of technologies and the people who use them.
Be sure to follow Jenny on Twitter @Jenny_L_Davis to keep up with her projects.
See you in a couple of weeks.