Note: This is part one of a three-part series. The second and third parts will be released in the upcoming weeks.

Deciphering the mechanisms behind human perception is one of the great challenges faced in the behavioral sciences. Much like the reasons people enjoy going to the dentist, the way our brain integrates sensory information into a perceptual experience remains largely a mystery. This does not mean, however, that we know nothing; much has been discovered, with much more on the way. Of the perceptual principles we understand so far, I’ll focus on just one: Affordances.

According to the psychologists Eleanor and James Gibson, all human sensation prepares us not just to experience the world, but to act in it. When viewing an object we use a variety of cues to understand what we’re looking at, including shape, color, size, orientation, and context. In addition to what the object looks like, however, we perceive an object’s identity based on how we can interact with it. When we see a cup, for example, we know that we can grab, lift, throw, fill, or drink from it. Each potential interaction is an affordance.

We use affordances constantly: we see a chair and we know we can sit in it; we see a door and we know we can open or close it; we see a book and we know we can open it, turn the pages, and read it. We don’t have to think about it. We’ve been interacting (I assume) with chairs and doors and books so long our affordances are automatic. Even my speaking of “knowing” belies the nature of affordances. They are not conscious designations; instead, they almost always occur without our awareness.

Child’s Play

I say almost always because there are important instances when affordances are decidedly not autonomic. Children, for example, are always encountering objects for the first time; their affordances are conscious and often comical. I distinctly remember my first encounter with one of these as a kid and my complete bewilderment as to what it was for. Only after I questioned my mom did I assign it the “correct” affordances and stop pretending it was a space ship (just kidding I still pretend they’re spaceships when I come across them). The same is true for adults learning a new skill or hobby, in which case affordances become not only conscious, but often self-conscious.

These instances give insight not only into how affordances work, but also how we can use them more deliberately to our advantage.

Creativity

As mentioned previously, children often have difficulty assigning the “correct” affordances to objects they see. While this can be quite comical (or frustrating, depending on the situation) it is precisely this fluidity of affordances that gives children one of their great strengths: Creativity.

Affordances may not be the first thing that comes to mind when thinking of creativity, but they are at its core. They deal in possibilities, what could be rather than what is, and therefore provide the basis for imaginative thinking.

Again, children are excellent at this: a stick in the woods isn’t just a stick, it’s a sword or a lightsaber. A cardboard box isn’t just a box, it’s a castle or a car or a spaceship. LEGOs, Play-Doh, and building blocks all operate under the premise that they can be anything, if only you have the imagination to make it. Children are constantly at play, so they constantly see things to play with.

Adults tend to struggle more with this. On one hand, we’ve been interacting with things so long we fail to see them for anything more than how they’re “supposed” to be used. On the other, we’ve had it beaten into us (sometimes literally) that mature people don’t play, at least not in the ways children do. There’s a stigma against adults who still play with LEGOs or enjoy playing cards or like LARPing. As a result, we get out of practice being creative, and we let our affordances fall flat.

This so detrimental because (among other things) affordances play an essential role in some of the most important aspects of life

First, let’s look at the process of invention. Invention and affordances are deeply intertwined, especially when the invention consists of adopting existing technologies for other uses. Take, for example, bubble wrap: initially created to be a textured wallpaper, it quickly became the primary method for protecting products in transit (as well as a great stress reliever). Frisbees came from the empty pie containers of the Frisbie Pie Company. Play-Doh itself was originally used as a wallpaper cleaner until someone realized it was great for modelling and molding. The world is full of products with unintended uses, all because people afforded them. The history of invention is, in part, a history of affordances.

Invention isn’t alone in this: all of art is an exercise in affordances. Some of my favorite pieces (like this) consists of artists seeing past what is and seeing what can be. They ignore the obvious and create something beautiful and fun out of what normally would seem mundane or ordinary. Similarly, one of my favorite taking googly eyes and putting them on things. At the extremes of art we find the blank canvas, the block of marble, and the ball of clay, all of which come with infinite affordances: whatever we can imagine. Like Michelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

If you want to be more creative, question your affordances.

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