Social affordances

A really interesting article on the concept of affordances from affordances evoked by social interaction highlighted several points to some of the current thoughts/reading/ideas.

" The concept of affordances, as introduced by Gibson (e.g., 1979), provides a way to describe the world that cuts across traditional subject-object dualities. Affordances go beyond value-free physical descriptions of the environment by expressing environmental attributes relative to humans. At the same time, they go beyond subjective interpretations (e.g., associations, schemas, or social conventions) by describing meaning relative to an objective physical world.

Affordances are primarily facts about action and interaction, not perception."

As technology is becoming more ubiquitous the concept of 'social affordance' , at first thought may provide an avenue of awareness to move towards the concept of 'invisible computing' as discussed by Don Norman. In such a way though that the step before this must be in an understanding of the situated actions per se as discussed by Lucy Suchman.

"Affordances exist not just for individual action, but for social interaction as well. Research on “social affordances” (e.g., Still & Good, 1991; Goldring, 1991) focuses on the possibilities for action that people offer one another and on the role of other people in pointing out new affordances (e.g., to babies). These are not social affordances, as defined above, but affordances for sociality."


I think this may be a start to inform the way in which I can think about the design environment/ecology by questioning the design of social affordances based upon an understanding of the ecology.

"Perhaps the most important affordance of the everyday world lacking in media spaces is the ability to move. As Gibson (1979) emphasised, movement is fundamental for perception.
We move towards and away from things, look around them, and move them so we can inspect them closely. Movement might allow people to compensate for the discontinuities and anisotropies of current media spaces (Gaver, 1992; c.f. Heath & Luff, 1991). Social interactions in media space would be better supported if people could explore remote sites as easily as they can move around their own rooms.

The ecological approach is useful in the design process because it describes perception and interaction in terms of the properties of the environment, as well as those of people, and design is fundamentally about manipulating the environment for people. Thus the ecological approach challenges researchers to avoid the temptation of using memory and inference in explanations of perception, and encourages them instead to discover the possibly high-level physical attributes that serve as information about the world."

And so my impression from this is that the 'Ecological approach' can look to challenge the way ubiquitous computing is perceived? And social interactions both with the artifact of the e-lab book and is ecology it operates within could be a way which to move forward with the e-lab book concept should operate.

Some thoughts from the book Thoughtful Interaction Design

The following is taken from the book 'Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology' by Jonas Löwgren & Erik Stolterman

" We live in an artificial world. It is a world made up of environments, systems, processes and things that are imaged, formed, and produced by humans. All these things have been designed, and all new things have to be designed. Someone has to decide their form, function, and structure as well as their ethical and aesthetical qualities. In this artificial world created by humans information technology is increasing becoming not only common but a vital and part. Our design world world is full of digital artifacts, that is things built around a core of information technology. We can find them in our workplaces, in our meeting and public spaces, and in our homes. Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives. "

Although very abstract in terms of the nature of 'digital artifacts' the nature of design questions that I think the paragraph looks to open is very much within the direction of my own work for the fundamental reason that

"Digital artifacts have a direct impact on our everyday lives"

And so if the concept behind the fundamental design is not clearly directed and understood in the working practice(even more so within the working practice of a complicated domain of scientists) then there will be fundamental flaws - This may lead to thoughts of a potential question towards the understanding of the present way of working(with paper) and existing technology and how it is and actually used - with this I feel there is a lead with some of the thoughts on ubiquitous computing and the concept of invisible computing, in that ubiquitous computing can in some scenarios be a collection of broken processes where the ideal solution would a scenario based around the invisible computing concept (I would interpret the invisible computing concept as the way someone can work with technology and not have to consciously think about using the technology - similar to the way a scientist will use and write in a paper based lab book now.- reminder to check the name of the research paper for the discussion of this debate. )

Again initial thoughts would point to how such a design strategy would provide how to move forward with the development of technology to the invisible computing concept ?

The thinking from the above book has been inspired by some thoughts from the blog by david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction where several more interesting points are raised

"Lowgren and Stolterman present their notion that interaction design works with a ‘material without qualities’. By this they means that digital artifacts can take on so many different forms–and the forms possible are constantly shifting due to technological advances–that is very hard to pin down a set list of qualities to describe the medium, as say a sculptor could describe their stone. They make this point more clear by suggesting that we think of bits as our material. Pondering this for a minute, I begin to realize that are an infinitum of possible physical forms and consequently qualities that bits can take on as they are presented to a user."

The following is then pointed out which I feel is closely linked with the understanding and concept of what an e-lab book is as a 'digital artifact'

"However, all digital artifacts have an aspect that doesn’t seem miles away and of which qualities can be quite easily pinned down: hardware used for display and input. While there are vast possibilities in this area too, for most part digital interaction to date has consisted of some basic elements of monitor, keyboard and mouse. It occurs to me now that there a lot of limitations in this configuration, and that by switching it up we might greatly reduce the percieved ‘distance’ between the physical and virtual world. G. Smith talks about the 4 dimensions of previous traditions that interaction design draws upon. I might argue that the 3-D, that is the language of traditional product design, has been the least utilized. With hardware advances this is changing a lot though, and the result is the introduction some much needed physicality to our overall language of interaction."

The final thoughts from david roedl materiality-in-languages-of-interaction lie with Lev Manovich who through his own approach of digital materialism and how analysis to these newer forms of interface hardware could/can question how the conception of the medium change?

This I think is a step towards the right type of questions that can be asked for my e-lab book , in a similar manner I wish to question how the concept changes from a working paper based artifact with clear affordances to the medium of technology and so how the concept of an e-lab book can be more clearly defined.

- the thoughts to do from this is to create an affordance list of the paper based lab book, this can be further enhanced by the information from the interviews - a further thought to raise is I still don't believe or have read any reasoning to believe an electronic version should be in any way a copy of a paper lab book and so such a design can simply borrow the best bits of the mental model of paper and maybe even the situated action to the various way of working(a more complete understanding would be required to demonstrated this part- maybe such a strategy for future designs can be informed by such existing mental models &/or situated actions of the work environment - which would have to be dependent on if the mental models &/or situated actions are effective ways of working - if not then this is where the continued development of technology can be designed more clearly to addressed the nature of poor/ineffective ways of working with the technology - instead of what continues to appear to be technology for technologies sake and not effectively directed at actually helping real peoples/scientists working problems (do need an an analogy and examine existing further research to help understand and demonstrate this )