Personal Affordances
March 1, 2023
Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: The Creative Act by Rick Rubin
Listening: Futures Bet by U.S. Girls(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status via email or in the comments)
Personal Affordances
Working the way I work is sub-optimal by many standards.
Over the years, I've figured out all sorts of ways to do my work more efficiently, but sometimes pull back from those approaches because the "enhanced" methods diminish my experience in some way.
Recently, for instance, I tried using an AI-powered summarizer to get a sense of a news story rather than reading and summarizing it myself. I was able to technically do my work using those externally generated bullet-points, but at the end of the day I felt ignorant about the very things I was keen to learn about; I felt like an intermediary cog, sucking up words from one location and transcribing them to another, and that made the labor—though somewhat shorter in duration—a lot less valuable for me.
These sorts of speed bumps haven't diminished my enthusiasm for figuring out little tweaks to my toolbox and workday peculiarities, though, and one of the most successful broad-based adjustments I’ve made has been focusing on the affordances I have in my life, my space, and my mindset.
An "affordance," in this context, is something in one's perceptual range that expresses or augments one's action potential.
(That's my definition: the coiner of the phrase, a psychologist named James Gipson, defined an affordance as a "value-rich ecological object" that provides benefits or causes injuries.)
So an affordance can be as simple as a doorknob—an object in our environment that tells us, "Hey, there's a door here that you can open or close" and enables that opening-closing action—or as complex as architecture or symbols/writing that tell us an area is off-limits, with the implication of punishments should we violate the designated boundaries (reduced action potential).
This concept is especially useful for user-interface designers and architects and product designers, because when you're wire-framing an app or blueprinting a school building or manufacturing a tea kettle, you want to make sure the intended users of these things understand what they're for, and what actions they enable/encourage or designate as off-limits (click this button to see the menu, go down this hallway to get to the principal's office, but don’t open this door which is full of cleaning chemicals, push this button to turn the kettle on or off).
This concept can be useful on a personal scale, too, though, if we take stock of the affordances in our spaces and lives, and then adjust them to better suit our desired outcomes.
I have a little art table set up right next to my main living room workspace, and I make sure to keep things on that table a little bit organized, but not too organized. I also always clean my palette and refill the water glass when I’m done for the day, because I've found that when I have a minimum amount of friction between me and sitting down to make something (without feeling like things are so tidy that I shouldn’t defile its perfection), I do so more frequently and casually.
This is a very minor adjustment to the art-related affordances I have in my life and space, but I've made similar trivial (though impactful) amendments to my audio recording setup, the arrangement (and composition) of apps on my phone and laptop, and to how my bedroom furniture is arranged.
How might I rearrange my work schedule to make more time for the people I'd like to spend time with? How might I change-up my writing habits so I’m able to write when my mindset is most optimized for it? How might I shove myself out the door when I need socialization, while also making and maintaining space for productive isolation and internal assessment?
How might I orient my time and energy and resources toward things that are important to me today, while also encouraging the sort of exploration that will someday lead to the evolution and/or replacement of those priorities?
There are other ways of framing these sorts of life/work design choices and adjustments, but I like the concept of recalibrating for "action potentials" because it helps me build spaces and lifestyle frameworks I can appreciate aesthetically and philosophically, but which also amplify my capacity and capabilities by smoothing some paths, while de-emphasizing (reducing the action potential of) the ones I’d like to dilute or remove.
If you found value in this essay, consider buying me a coffee :)
My Work, Elsewhere
Aspiring Generalist / Brain Lenses (podcast) / Climate Happenings / Let’s Know Things (podcast) / Never Not Curious / Notes On the News / One Sentence News (podcast) / You Probably Don’t Need
Might I suggest listening to:
Interesting & Useful
Exactly what it says on the tin: relaxing little online games and calm, lofi music accompaniment.
When Lethal Weapons Grew on Trees
“The bow is one of humanity's most essential and fascinating technologies, perhaps only eclipsed by the controlled use of fire. Despite endless academic speculation on the subject for almost 200 years, we don't know when archery originated…In the 1930s, in Stellmoor, Germany, archaeologists found roughly 100 arrow shafts dated to between 8,000 and 10,000 BC. The oldest bow came to light in the 1940s in Holmegaard, Denmark. Scientists dated it to between 6,500 and 7,000 BC.”
2022 Interactive Fiction Competition Winners
Like “Choose Your Own Adventures”? The winners of this competition are like that but diverse, modern, award-winning, online, and free.
Outro
It’s still cold here in Milwaukee, but the ice is finally starting to melt (getting in and out of my parking space, alone, has been an adventure this past week) and we even had a full day of sunshine yesterday, which was nice (though also a shock to the system after all this gray-toned weather we’ve been having).
I’ve been making tweaks to my podcast setup and am preparing to change hosts for a few of my projects this weekend; a big leap and stressful every time I have to do it (and my monthly expenses will go up substantially as a consequence—which is less than ideal following a year in which income has trended sternly downward) but I think it will be the right choice longer-term, and should solve a few long-time irritations (even as it no doubt introduces new ones).
In any case, wish me luck and light a candle to the podcast gods so that things go smoothly, if you can spare a free moment!
What have you been up to lately? Making any (major or minor) changes to your lifestyle/tools/affordances/habits? Looking forward to anything you’d like to share with a stranger from the internet?
Drop me an email and tell me what’s up, or leave a comment if you’d like to share with everyone—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
If you’re keen to send something physical my way (it’s been gobs of fun receiving your letters and postcards! Thank you!), here’s my address:
Colin Wright
PO Box 11442
Milwaukee, WI 53211
You can also communicate via the usual methods: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or AI tool encyclopedia.
Appreciation campaign (I like this idea a lot)