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.