affordances evoked by social interactionFebruary 23, 2007
From AFFORDANCES FOR INTERACTION: THE SOCIAL IS MATERIAL FOR DESIGN
William W. Gaver
Gaver, W. W. (1996). Affordances for interaction: the social is material for design. Ecological Psychology, 8(2), 111–129.
Gaver describes affordances not as perception-based relative aspects of the environment that become noticed in activities (like Gibson’s affordances), but goes beyond it claiming that there are affordances, which are not perceptible per se, but which emerge due to interaction and actions in the environment.
There is a tendency to invoke sociological and anthropological constructs such as “communities of practice” or “social convention” rather than recognising the degree to which social activities are embedded in and shaped by the material environment.
Seemingly similar material conditions are incorporated into seemingly different social behaviours.
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. This contrasts with the common impression that affordances refer to—approximately—situations in which one can see what to do.
They allow meaning to be understood in terms of the relations of humans and their environment.
When affordances are perceived, a tight link between perception and action may ensue. But the concept is also useful in describing situations in which perceptual information is misleading about possibilities for action, or those in which affordances exist but information for them does not. In general, the perceptibility of an affordance should not be confused with the affordance itself.
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.
The interpretation given to unanswered communications varies depending on the medium. For instance, the delay between sending postal mail and deciding it has gone unanswered is much longer than that between dialling a telephone number and deciding it will not be picked up.
The properties of email also constrain the social interactions that it mediates. Because email is newer, less predictable, and more varied than other media, however, the behaviours that form are less stable and more open to examination. Subcultures have formed whose uses of email vary analogously to the differences between telephone and postal mail use. Some groups use email incessantly, monitoring it continuously and replying to messages almost immediately after they are received. Others use email only occasionally, reading new messages once a day or less, and replying to them only after some period of thought. And some regard email as a high-tech curiosity to which they would never entrust any important communication.
These communities do not reflect arbitrary differences in local culture, however, but the affordances of the email systems they use. If email is troublesome to access, slow, difficult to operate, prone to breakdown, and expensive, then intensive email cultures are unlikely to develop around it. If email systems are slow, they may be used analogously to postal mail – relatively formally and infrequently. If they are unreliable, then they cannot support formal communication well at all and will tend to be used as an unimportant novelty.
A range of social behaviours can thus form around the differing affordances of email, with the fact that it is viewed as a single medium confusing their coordination. Unanswered email will be interpreted differently by the two communities.
Moreover, the sender and recipient may have different interpretations of the same unanswered email, leading to new confusion and tensions.
The differences themselves are unavailable, or at least not obvious, to the sender and recipient.
Analysing the affordances offered by media spaces is useful in understanding their differences from the everyday medium, in part because it suggests design possibilities relatively directly (Gaver, 1991). Several limitations on the perceptual information media spaces convey become clear from such an analysis.
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.
Designing Electronic Collaborative Learning Environments
Pieter Jelle Beers
Kirchner, P., Strijbos, J-W., Kreijns, K. & Beers, B. J. (2004). Designing electronic collaborative learning environments. ETR&D, 52(3), 47–66.
The authors distinguish between technological, educational and social affordances. It seems they rely mainly on the perceptable concept of affordances in case of technological and educational affordances and isocial affordances, the affordance concept of Gaver which suggests that interaction itself in the collaborative system, might determine some affordances differently is not emphasised much in case of social affordances.
The question is not what outcomes specific educational techniques and collaborative work forms cause, but rather what activities they actually afford, also often referred to as the affordances of a learning environment. Specific types of learning need to be afforded in different ways (i.e., different opportunities provided for learning) because the learners perceive and interact with each other and with the environment differently.
An affordance is, by definition, characterized by two relationships. First, there must be a reciprocal relationship between the organism and the environment.
The affordances must be perceivable and meaningful so that they can be used and must support or anticipate an action.
Second, there must be a perception-action coupling.
In Gibson’s (1977) view, natural selection has tuned a species’ effectivities to the affordances associated with its niche or occupation (Allen & Otto, 1996). In
Gibson’s terms, effectivities (i.e., one’s capabilities for action) allow humans to exploit their world just as effectivities such as wings allow birds to exploit the air for travel and the branches of trees for nesting.
Norman (1988) linked affordances to an object’s usability, and thus these affordances are designated technological or technology affordances (Gaver, 1991).
Kreijns, Kirschner, and Jochems (2002) defined social affordances—analogous to technological affordances—as the “properties of a CSCL environment that act as social-contextual facilitators relevant for the learner’s social interaction” (p. 13).
Kirschner (2002) defined educational affordances as those characteristics of an artifact that determine if and how a particular learning behavior could possibly be enacted within a given context.
The last interaction-design sequence suggests that the affordances are derived from learners’ behaviour, translated to the affordances by developers, tested in activity through learner’s perception and action and then evaluated on the basis of effectiveness on learning.
At iCamp Madrid meeting we discussed how should we define the necessary pedagogical (now i would rather use the concept educational due to different connotation of pedagogy term in german and british educational systems) affordances evoked by actions, which should meet the educational affordances of supposed tools; what would happen if we define these affordances teacher-centered way. The 6-stage interaction-design sequence suggest we should collect the web 2.0 learning activities first, and then derive the educational affordances from user’s behaviours in actions with tools.
The ideas of Gaver suggest that we will never be able of defining educational affordances in actions objective and definitive way, rather there exists the fuzzy set of affordances each user might act upon in interactive settings.
I like the idea that not all the educational affordances can be directly perceived by senses (eyes, ears), there are educational affordances of tools (e.g. support_community_sharedmeaning) which have intersubjective nature and which exist as the sum of shared perception plus the sythesis of what was perceived.