Andrew Basden.
However, discourse in the IS field around affordance has been confined to highlighting the importance of the idea or classifying types of affordance. There has been little discussion of the nature of affordance, or of how to benefit from insights about affordance that have emerged in other fields. Both require a philosophical understanding of affordance as an ontological primitive that applies across all fields. However, which philosophical issues are important to affordance is not yet clear.
This paper reviews discourses around affordance, to identify a seven philosophical issues that are important to understanding affordance, especially in the IS field. The notion of affordance might offer a basis for discourse between the fields of information systems and HCI.
KEYWORDS: Affordance, philosophical issues, materiality, meaning, subject-object relationship, IS and HCI.
Defined variously -- as "the perceived and actual properties of a thing, primarily those functional properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used" [Salomon 1993, 51] or "the mutuality of actor intentions and technology capabilities that provide the potential for a particular action" [Majchrzak et al. 2013] -- the notion of affordance is one way to theorise the ICT artefact [Orlikowski & Iacono 2001] and its 'materiality' [Leonardi 2012]. It enables discussion of what it is about an ICT artefact or information system that enables certain uses, benefits or problems in the life or work of the user, so that the constraining and enabling characteristics of ICT may be understood more clearly. Affordance might also, in principle, be useful with design of information systems.
The above examples of affordances are at the individual or organisational level. Affordances of other kinds can also occur. For example, Conole & Dyke [2004a] also discuss what ICT-as-a-whole affords to society. Applying the notion of affordance at a societal level might offer two benefits. Societal issues like surveillance [Lyon 2003] or cyberloafing and cyberbullying [Blanchard & Henle, 2008] are usually discussed simply as issues in society, whereas the notion of affordance offers us the possibility of discussing what it is about ICT that has such impacts. Discussion in the IS field of issues at the individual, organisational and societal levels, have for too long been separated into silos that are isolated from each other and there is a method to bring them together [Bell & Wood-Harper 2014]. The general notion of affordance offers the chance to bring these discourses together in a principled way.
Having recently been dominated by social construction and social shaping perspectives, the field of IS is enabled by the idea of affordance to begin to take seriously the ICT artefact itself without a return to technological determinism [Hutchby 2001; Bloomfield et al. 2010]. Hutchby suggests affordance offers a fourth phase of understanding, after Technological Determinism, Social Construction of Technology and Social Shaping of Technology, which he calls Technological Shaping of Sociality: social media, for example, is changing the way people and organisations function [Majchrzak et al. 2013]. Likewise, Critical Realism might offer an antidote [Mingers et al. 2013]. However, we do not want to sacrifice the insights about innovation, power and structure that come from social construction or shaping.
The IS field came late to the idea of affordance. The idea originated in the 1970s in the field of ecological psychology with the work of J.J. Gibson, to enable consideration of how animals perceive and act in their environment, where one item (a rock) might afford climbability, and another, eatability [Gibson 1979]. In the 1980s, the idea was adapted to artefact design and human-computer interaction (HCI), where Norman's [1988] classic Psychology of Everyday Things, sparked widespread interest. Artefacts like doors afford going-through and door-handles afford opening-the-door. In the field of HCI, the affording items are not only hardware like keyboards that afford user writing or control, but also screen objects like buttons, which afford clicking, and barcharts, which afford comparison of quantities. The notion of affordance is frequently used in HCI design, where affordances are seen as 'good' or 'bad' [Rietveld 2008].
In the IS field, from the 2000s onwards, the notion of affordance has expanded yet further to enable discussion of what whole ICT artefacts or systems afford in the life or work of the user, organisations and even society.
The discourse on affordance in IS so far shows some limitations, as will become clear. The discourse has been primarily of two kinds, about construction of taxonomies of affordances, and about how affordance relates to materiality or IS paradigms [e.g. Hutchby 2001], but with little discussion about the nature of affordance in IS as such. There is much ambiguity about the concept, with inconsistency in the terminology used, and controversy about the ontological nature of technology [Majchzrak & Markus 2013]. The taxonomies that have arisen differ significantly from each other, with few suggestions of how they might relate to each other. Most discussion of IS affordance relies on retrospective study, whereas in the field of HCI, affordance is treated as a future-oriented possibility during the design process.
The limitations in the IS discourse could be tackled one by one. Instead, it might be preferable to develop a clearer understanding of the notion of affordance, on the basis of which some of them might be tackled together. It might also be beneficial to listen to the discourses in the other fields, of HCI and ecological psychology, where some of these issues are being discussed, and translate their findings across to the IS field. Unfortunately, apart from the occasional reference to Gibson as originator of the idea, and with the possible exception of Robey et al. [2012], the discourse around affordance in IS has seldom engaged deeply with those in other fields. To engage would require developing an understanding of affordance that can apply across the fields, with which we can situate the various kinds of affordance in relation to each other and translate insights arising in other fields in a principled way for IS. (It might also allow insights emerging from the IS field to contribute to the fields of HCI and ecological psychology, thus making IS a reference discipline for those fields [Baskerville & Myers 2002].)
Even after 30 years' debate about affordance in ecological psychology, however, the notion of affordance is still challenging and problematic; Withagen et al. [2012] conclude that "a full-blown account of affordance still awaits us". Sanders [1997] argues that affordance is an ontological primitive, and Chemero [2003], that affordance requires a new ontology. Affordance requires philosophical, and not just disciplinary, treatment, especially if it is to be understood across the fields. However, the philosophical treatment should not be an exercise in abstract philosophy but one of identifying philosophical issues that are important to affordance. Then we may make sense of (theorise) the idea of affordance.
However, which issues of a philosophical nature are important for affordance is not yet clear. Issues like situatedness or communality [Mansour et al. 2013] have been suggested, but some seem specific to their application. So this paper aims to identify some such necessary philosophical issues issues. It reviews some of the discourses around affordance in the fields of ecological psychology, HCI and especially IS. It then identifies seven issues about affordance as that require philosophical attention, including diversity, agents in environment, engaged activity, possibility, perception, normativity and meaning. Philosophers that have been linked with affordance are discussed, but found wanting.
The idea of affordance struck a chord, because it enabled discussion of issues that had hitherto not been possible in psychology, which had previously been centred solely on the individual, and the field of ecological psychology was born. From the 1980s onwards, specific affordances were studied [e.g. Pufall & Dunbar 1992] and the nature and characteristics of ecological affordance have been debated. Questions like: whether affordances are events or not [Stoffregen 2000]; whether affordances are features or properties, of situations or objects [Chemero 2003]; whether they are abilities or dispositions [Scarantino 2004]; whether they are with or without mental representation [Nakayama 1994; Marsh et al. 2009], and some others mentioned later.
Above all, the contentious idea that "Gibson's concept of affordances was an attempt to undermine the traditional dualism of the objective and subjective" [Costall 2012] arouse much debate, sometimes appealing to philosophers like Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Gibson [1979, 129] maintained that properties that are meaningful to the animal are located in the environment item itself, not only in the animal; the subjective in the object. This is discussed later.
Norman then extended these ideas to HCI design, whereby user interface objects possess good or poor affordance. The idea struck a chord in the HCI community and spread fast, so that HCI designers began to talk about "adding an affordance", thus diluting the idea. Norman [1999] tried to remove ambiguity by differentiating between 'real' affordances (physical characteristics of the object that allow its operation) and 'perceived' affordances (appearance of the object that give clues to its operation).
Numerous articles have been published by the HCI community on affordances, often about detailed affordances, such as of shape-changing objects [Tiab & Hornbaek 2016]. These individual articles are not discussed here, though some of them raise important issues, such as that affordances might be dynamic rather than static.
Norman's [1988; 1999] ideas were not entirely clear, so Hartson [2003] responded by suggesting that there are four main categories of affordance in HCI (see Table 1 for examples):
This classification sharpens up the idea of poor or false affordance, where people are misled. Hartson demonstrates the need to classify kinds of affordance and types of specific affordances within each kind. His functional affordance might be seen as leading us into the field of IS.
Some of these issues contain principles that are potentially relevant to the field of IS, such as, normativity of affordance, the use of affordance in design, and the different kinds of affordance.
For example, Mascheroni & Vincent [2016] discuss how mobile technology affords "full-time contact" with peers and how this has both positive and negative repercussions. Many such individual affordances have been discussed but they offer few philosophical challenges. Classification of affordances, however, is more philosophically interesting.
For example, Zammuto et al. [2007] try to identify some of the main affordances that ICT brings to organisational processes. They present examples of five affordances of ICT in organisations, which are listed in Table 1. These are what information in IS affords organisational and business processes, and they are "created by the conjunction of IT and organisation features, coupled with management intent" and might enable "new forms of oganizing" [p.752].
An important insight exemplified in their paper is that the idea of affordance can be extended to organisational concerns, in which what is meaningful to management is located in, and enabled by, ICT itself. From the number of citations, it seems their paper struck a chord in the IS field.
Majchrzak et al. [2013] discuss affordances of social media in organisations because "little is known about how these social media technologies may change the way individuals are engaged in the way knowledge is shared across the organization" [Majchzrak & Markus 2013, 39]. Desiring to shift the discourse about organisational knowledge away from knowledge management toward 'knowledge conversations', Majchrzak et al. theorise four affordances of social media that might inform such discourse; see Table 1. Since they do not explain how, nor on what grounds, these four were delineated, their taxonomy remains open to question, but they make two useful contributions to the discourse around affordance as such.
They discuss how each of their affordances links to extant theory in various fields; for example, metavoicing is linked to critical mass theory. They find that extant theories only partially account for the affordance. Second, they draw attention to the negative possibilities afforded by social media, as well as the positive ones; for example, metavoicing might also exacerbate groupthink, and network-informed association, "blind preferential attachment" ("rich get richer"). Most authors discuss only the positive possibilities.
Schrock [2015] discuss four affordances that mobile media have to alter communicative practices, which are listed in Table 1. Like most taxonomies, they are derived from a review of the literature on IS use.
Treem & Leonardi [2012] argue that "social media are of important consequence to organisational communication processes because they afford behaviors that were difficult or impossible to achieve in combination before". Analysing a wide range of papers that reported using a wide range of types of ICT, with a qualitative analysis, they identified four affordances listed in Table 1. They found these affordances to be "relatively stable", but recognised that they might not be authoritative nor complete. However the sources were largely from professional use over a limited time frame, almost all in highly-developed technological cultures, and did not include, for example, computer games.
Mansour et al. [2013] undertook an empirical test of Treem & Leonardi's affordances, interviewing 20 wiki users in two large corporations to find out what wiki use meant to them. They found Treem & Leonardi's affordances were too constraining, so they reinterpreted the data, to generate four more affordances, listed in Table 1. Exactly what their four new affordances mean, however, is not entirely clear, as is discussed below under Diversity.
Mansour et al. then discuss briefly some properties of affordance, as such, seeking to understand how they operate when professional people collaborate on compiling material using a wiki.
Some of these are discussed later.
Conole & Dyke [2004a] wanted to find affordances of ICT use in education and learning, covering ICT in general rather than specific technologies. They identify and discuss ten affordances shown in Table 1. Like Majchrzak et al. [2013] and unlike most other authors, Conole & Dyke discuss the negative as well as positive possibilities. For example, what affords accessibility can also lead to information overload, which implies that users must develop discernment in what they select.
They invite critique and refinement of their taxonomy, suggesting six questions for discussion. Boyle & Cook [2004] immediately responded, suggesting that the concept of affordance was still too ambiguous and subject to "hopeful expectation", and that transition from ecological psychology to social constructivist approaches is challenging but "provides ample opportunities for theoretical elaboration". They also suggest that instead of developing taxonomies like that of Conole & Dyke [2004a] it might be better to develop frameworks for envisaging new tools. Conole & Dyke's [2004b] immediate response is a little disappointing because it added no new insights about affordance but merely defended their original ideas. Thus it seems that Conole & Dyke's [2004a] taxonomy, which seems important because it is comprehensive, has still to receive proper critique.
A close examination shows that most of their affordances are of two kinds: what ICT as a whole affords to society as a whole, and what ICT artefacts afford to users in education and learning. For example, ICT affords society speed of change, which results in the undermining of custom and tradition, but to users this can result in conflicts in information and shallowness of thought. Their discussion of societal and user issues is interleaved, and thus is somewhat confused. However, it is an important insight that affordance might be not just to individuals or organisations but to society from ICT-as-a-whole.
Objects might afford unexpected meaning to the agent. In the case of IS, this makes innovative use possible, in which features are used in ways not expected nor intended by the designers. People do not always realize the potential of technology in their work situations, and people and organisations use technology in ways the designers never intended [Majchzrak & Markus 2013]. For example, students might use a geometry package for activities unrelated to geometry [Singletary et al. 2002]. Users "continuously interpret and reconstruct the meanings related to the technology" [Vyas 2013]. Majchzrak & Markus [2013] believe that the notion of affordance offers insight into this, because possibility of innovative usage will depend on what the artefact and its features afford, which need not be known in advance.
"The player now wants to leave the room and she perceives information about possible actions, possibilities relative to her/Guybrush's action capabilities and the situation at hand. She sees the door with a plate on its right side, and perceives it as 'approach-able' and possibly 'pass-throughable'. ... She knows that doors in the game are not actually opened in the same manner as in the real world; instead they are passed through by just walking into them (if it is a door that can be passed through), and she also knows that in order to do so, she needs to keep pushing the button that makes Guybrush move (in this case the avatar is controlled through a keyboard). ... She walks towards the door, and "bumps" into it because she cannot pass through. ... The 'pass-through-ableness' of the door was a misperceived affordance." [p.88-9]
With games, the concept of false affordance [Gaver 1991] becomes important, in order to create puzzles like the non-pass-throughable door.
Notice, however, some confusion in their account, between the user with the button on the user interface and the avatar with the door in the game. This feels like a category error. It is true that the user-keyboard and avatar-door affordances somehow belong together, but there is a need to conceptually separate them and understand the relationship between them. The user-keyboard affordance is an HCI affordance. The avatar-door affordance is one that has not otherwise been discussed, namely to do with the information content that is mediated via the user interface, and the user playing a role (like the avatar, Guybrush). The user (player) engages with both in one activity.
This may be extended to ICT other than games, such as when a nurse finds information in a patient database that alarms them and take immediate action. Usually, this role is indistinguisable from the real user, but in the case of a virtual world, the two agents differ.
One important affordance is missing from Rambusch & Susi [2008]. It may be seen from the perspective of information systems: games afford fun, challenge or relaxation, in the same way that social media affords network-informed association [Majchrzak et al. 2013]. Rambusch & Susi ignore this, probably because their background is HCI.
Reflecting on their paper reveals that there are at least three kinds of affordance in game-playing and other intensive ICT use: Affordance of ICT-user engaged with with keyboard or other user interface objects which the game employs (HCI affordance); Affordance of the virtual world or other information content (a kind of affordance not so far discussed); Affordance of the game (or other ICT artefact or system) as a whole in the life of the player (IS-style affordance).
Table 1 summarises the above kinds of affordance in order of date of publication, and lists examples of each kind, or presents taxonomies of types of affordance in each kind compiled by the authors.
|
Affordance Kind or Type | Environment | Agent | Types (Taxonomy or examples) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Animal affordances [Gibson 1979] | Physical | Animals | Climbability, eatability, vantage, escape etc. |
| Artefact affordances [Norman 1988] | Material artefact | Artefact-wielder | Door (going-through), handle (door-opening) |
|
HCI affordances [Norman 1988]; Hardware UI [Rambusch & Susi 2008] | Visual, aural UI objects | User | Bars in barchart (showing-quantity, comparing-quantities) |
| Physical affordances [Hartson 2003] | Physical or sensory | User | Clicking an object, kinesthetics, shape of objects, and 20 others |
| Sensory affordances [Hartson 2003] | Sensory UI objects | Individual user | Detectability, distinguishability of sound, force, Auditory quality, Findability, and 15 others |
| Cognitive affordances [Hartson 2003] | Distinguished things | Individual user | Legibility, Layout complexity, Clarity, precision, predictability of meaning, Error avoidance, and 30 others |
| Functional affordances [Hartson 2003] | UI controls | User's information tasks | e.g. Automatic typing corrections against the intentions of the user |
| IS affordances [Conole & Dyke 2004a] | ICT | Information | Accessibility, Speed of change, Diversity, Communication & collaboration, Reflection, Multi-modal, non-linear, Risk, fragility, uncertainty, Immediacy, Monopolisation, Surveillance |
| IS affordances [Zammuto et al. 2007] | Informationl |
Organisational users with economic (business) overtones | Visualisation of entire work processes, Real-time / flexible product and service creation, Virtual collaboration, Mass collaboration, Simulation |
| Rambusch & Susi [2008] | Information | Content meaningful to avatar | e.g. Door-opening in game |
| IS affordances [Treem & Leonardi 2012] | Information | Social media user | Visibility of content, Persistence of content, Editability of content, Association |
| IS affordances [Mansour et al. 2013] | Information | Wiki contributors | Viewability, Commenting, Validation, Accessibility |
| IS affordances [Majchrzak et al. 2013] | Information | Knowledge sharers | Metavoicing (comment on presence rather than content e.g. voting), Triggered attending (setting |
| Schrock [2015] | Mobile media | Mobile communicators | Portability, Availability, Locatability, Multimediality |
|
| Game | Fun |
McGrenere & Ho's [2000, 8] belief that "As the concept of affordances is used currently, it has marginal value because it lacks specific meaning" is obviously not true, but it is still a challenge to us, because it is not clear how all these kinds and types of affordance relate to each other, nor on what basis each taxonomy or examples may be critiqued or refined. How may we judge whether there are other kinds or types? To address such questions, requires an understanding of affordance itself: What, after all, is affordance? How does it escape the straitjacket of social constructionism and social shaping and be free to pose questions about the 'objective' reality of ICT, without ignoring their insights and without falling back into technological determinism [Hutchby 2001]?
Following Treem & Leonardi [2012], we will seek to make possible a 'stable' understanding of affordance and, following Conole & Dyke [2004a] and Costall [2012], a comprehensive and canonical understanding. We will seek to identify issues that are important in, and necessary to, affordance across the fields, which can be addressed philosophically. No claim is made that this set of issues is complete.
Affordance is something that people experience within their everyday activity, often without thinking about it. While our philosophical understanding should be able to incorporate extant (and future) theory, as Majchrzak et al. [2013] have done, it should not be constrained by theory but should be open to everyday experience as viewed with a pre-theoretical attitude.
Our philosophical understanding should also not presuppose professional, organisational use of ICT, but should actively encourage interest in other uses, such as in personal use, 'hedonic' use [Lin & Bhattarcherjee 2010] and computer games, as in Rambusch & Susi [2008].
Kinds of affordance range from Gibson's animals, Norman's doors, Hartson's user interfaces, Conole & Dyke's ICT, Majchrzak et al.'s social media, Rambusch & Susi's games, and society as a whole. Table 1 shows them as having different pairs of kinds of agent and environment. We (authors) have found no discussion of on what philosophical basis kinds of affordance may be differentiated from each other, how the differentiation or new candidate kinds may be critiqued, nor how they relate to each other.
In the field of ecological psychology, materialist explanations for affordance have been attempted, as in Gaver [1996]. However, a materialist perspective prevents us understanding phenomena like editability, network-informed association or generative role-taking in their full conceptual, linguistic and social richness. Sanders [1997] argues, against materialist reductions, that affordance is an ontological primitive, which can apply across many fields. We wish to be able to understand, in what fundamental ways kinds of affordance -- physical, psychical, cognitive, informational, organisational, social, societal and others -- differ from each other and yet may be treated in an equivalent manner, without any tendency to ignore any or reduce any to the other.
Types of affordance within kinds are also diverse. They form taxonomies or are offered as examples. Again, no philosophical basis has been discussed by which to differentiate them, critique the differentiations, construct taxonomies or discuss how they relate to each other. For example, Mansour et al. [2013] differentiate commenting from Treem & Leonardi's [2012] editing, on the grounds that some users felt they lacked sufficient knowledge to edit the documents, but could give comments. Treem & Leonardi include commenting as part of editing. How may the difference between editing and commenting be understood philosophically? Mansour et al.'s viewability covers "viewing 'in silence'", "showing off", and "written content for special purposes"), but what is the common thread among them that can be justified philosophically as different from Treem & Leonardi's visibility? How may these all be related? How, if at all, do these relate to Zammuto et al.'s [2007] visualisation, Majchrzak et al.'s [2013] metavoicing, or Hartson's [2003] legibility or clarity?
Further, on what philosophical basis may types be related to kinds?
All such questions have yet to be discussed. Everyday experience is highly diverse [Bourdieu 1977, de Certeau 1984], but the tendency of the theoretical mode of thought is to narrow this down by studying single aspects [Dooyeweerd 1984; Basden 2011]. In order to be able to situate the narrowed versions each theory focuses on, a philosophical understanding of affordance should be open to diversity of kinds and types, and provide a framework for accepting the validity of each, rather than merely fusing them together into one undifferentiated, amorphous mess.
Merleau-Ponty [1962], whose philosophy has been applied to affordance, recognised diversity, for example in types of 'distance' (spatial, physical, biological and even in "play") [Telero 2005, 453], but Merleau-Ponty is too intent on explaining everything in terms of the perceiving body, that he fails to make this diversity a philosophical problem. Such implicit recognition of diversity is common but explicit discussion of it in philosophy is rare.
Neither subjective nor intersubjective interpretation is a sufficient basis for understanding the diversity of affordances, though they might be sufficient for understanding how affordances are perceived. To argue that fully would require a complete book, but space here allows us only to refer to the later discussion about affordances being somehow located in the environment even though no agent ever encounters them. Empirical study might serve us better, but even that is influenced by preconceptions by researcher and participants [Klein & Myers 1999]. A philosophically sounder approach might be to employ ontologies, such as that by Bunge [1979]. Though his differentiation of biological, technical and social systems might be useful for differentiating animal, artefactual and social affordances, it does not support post-social differences, such as between economy, aesthetics, justice, morals or beliefs [Dooyeweerd 1984], which are important in the IS field. Maslow's [1943] hierarchy might be useful, but has been severely criticised [Wahba & Bridwell 1976].
Dooyeweerd [1984] argues that there is a fundamental problem lying at the very roots of Western philosophy for 2,500 years, which has always led it into unresolvable, fruitless antinomies, and that we need a radically different approach to philosophy. Part of the problem relates to philosophy's treatment of meaning, discussed below, on which the act of differentiation depends.
The nature of the relationship has been much discussed in ecological psychology, probably because psychology then was focusing on the individual. Appeals have been made to Heidegger to understand the relationship [Kadar & Effken 1994; Dreyfus & Spinosa 1997]. Heidegger's "Perceivedness ... is in a certain way objective, in a certain way subjective, yet neither of the two" [Heidegger 1982, 314 cited by Dotov 2012] closely resembles Gibson's [1979, 129] "neither an objective property nor a subjective property, or it is both". Affordance might be Heidegger's 'equipment', 'ready-to-hand', 'for-what' or 'in-order-to', and is always "pressing forward into possibilities". Heidegger, however, ended up dissolving the difference between subject and object rather than treating them as equally important.
The nature of the relationship has been less discussed in HCI, except perhaps for Winograd & FLores [1986], who recommend Heidegger.
In the IS field, environment (context) remains an amorphous, undefined background, yet "for researchers to be able to address materiality in a more theoretically rigorous manner, elements of context need to be specified in greater precision" [Faraj & Azad 2012].
Some IS authors try to reduce their consideration of the object to (inter)subjective attribution of meaning by subjects, as in Orlikowski & Scott's [2008] idea of sociomateriality and in accounts based on Vygotsky's activity theory [e.g. Oliver 2011, Kaptelinin & Nardi 2012]. Others follow Latour [1987] in making ICT and users symmetrically equivalent, which also echoes Heidegger [1962]. Yet in everyday experience we do not treat ICT as identical with people, and there is no such symmetry in affordance:
"The organism depends on the environment for its life, but the environment does not depend on the organism for its existence." [Gibson 1979, 129]
In IS, though ICT is active, different things and ethical standards are expected of its activity compared with people.
These theoretical or philosophical perspectives fail to do justice to affordance qua affordance, since neither object nor subject can be reduced to the other [Hutchby 2001].
This philosophical issue is made clearest in the field of ecological psychology. Neither subject nor object can be reduced to each other - a conundrum with which Gibson [1979] struggled. Properties meaningful to the object (the rock's flatness and rigidity) link in a necessary way to properties meaningful to the subject (like climbability, vantage). The two sets of properties are meaningful in different realms. On the one hand, climability is enabled by the physical and spatial properties, though it cannot be predicted from them alone without 'smuggling in' animal-relative meaningfulness. On the other, this subjective property is of the object, not of the subject alone; it is the rock itself that is climbable (a psychical property), and would remain so even though no animal ever climbed it.
The importance of Gibson's work for the HCI and IS fields is not just to coin the term 'affordance', but that, "where most psychologists and philosophers are happy naming the divide the subjective-objective, Gibson would rather we repair the cut entirely" [Shaw 2003, 93]. With affordance, "one gets subjectivity and objectivity wrapped up in a single package" [Shaw 2003, 97].
Not only does the agent function, but so does the object, though this can seem more passive, appearing as a property. It is functioning according to the laws of the realm of the environment. The climbed rock, in being rigid and offering friction, functions according to physical laws, and, in being flat, horizontal and near the agent, according to spatial laws. The affordance depends on the animal functioning in these same physical and spatial realms (e.g. foot-rock friction, height of knee and rock).
Likewise IS affordance depends on the user functioning in the realm in which ICT functions, which includes those studied by computer science, HCI and and informatics. The user also functions in the realms of business organisation [Zammuto et al. 2007], computer gaming [Rambusch & Suzi 2008] and so on. In these realms, use might be innovative, as discussed above. In societal affordance the agent functioning might be said to be in such things as cyberbulling, cyberloafing or surveillance, as mentioned above.
Activity or functioning with ICT is more complex than that of animals and often mediated by tools or involving communal activity sometimes at a distance, so Kaptelinin & Nardi [2012] have applied Vygotsky's Activity Theory. This is limited to adding a notion of mediation to human affordances in HCI, yet it might enlarge our understanding of affordance activity. Rozycki et al. [2012] link affordance with Activity Theory, not to contribute to understanding affordance, but rather to use affordance to augment Activity Theory to yield an Activity Affordance Framework.
Volkoff & Strong [2013] locate the idea of affordance within Critical Realism's notion of generative mechanism (a way of working, tendency, capability), as one that needs triggering by a goal-oriented actor in relation with it rather than occurring in a structure or on its own, and they suggest it involves a causal chain (possessed, exercised, actualised, observed). This, however, provides little new insight about what affordance is, because the triggering (actualising) and relationship are already accounted for by other means. Mingers et al. [2013] suggest that the contribution of their paper is to refine Critical Realism rather than explain affordance.
With Volkoff & Strong, many others presume affordance to be goal-oriented [Markus & Silver 2008; Leonardi 2013] or involving deliberate rational choice of affordances [Mansour et al. 2013], which means that the affordance is distal. Yet in everyday experience, affordances are more proximal, in Polanyi's [1967] sense of our being closely engaged with them and unaware of them, rather than thinking explicitly about them [Heft 2003]. This is particularly true in computer games and virtual reality, and also in much intensive use of IS, where the affordances might be not only proximal but immersive. Our philosophical foundation needs to be able to cope with distal, proximal and even immersive functioning. It may be that what is common between both goals and proximal affordances is meaningfulness, discussed below.
Merleau-Ponty [1962] has been related to affordance [Sanders 1993; Dreyfus 1996]. His view of perception as active, pre-rational response in a perceivable world, and his emphasis on the body, seemingly lend themselves to understanding affordance. To both Gibson and Merleau-Ponty, perception (including of affordances) is part of ordinary living [Sanders 1993]. Instead of the subjectivism of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty made the relationship between perceiving body and world central. This emphasis on the body might suit animal affordances, but it hinders a full appreciation of the aspects of IS features that do not involve the body; such as editability [Treem & Leonardi 2012], visualising entire processes [Zammuto et al. 2007] or network-informed associating [Majchrzak et al. 2013]. Some use the body as a metaphor and, though appeal to metaphor might be inspirational, it cannot substitute for sound argument.
In the field of HCI, psychical plays a part, but full perception involves mediation by tools [Kaptelinin & Nardi 2012] and interpretation of content.
In the IS field, the issue of perception of what ICT affords the user has been sparsely discussed. Faraj & Azad [2012] discuss how perceptions change across different contexts even when inherent affordances might not. Mansour et al. [2013] allude to perception in their discussion of choice of affordances, but go little further than that. Much work is still needed.
The philosophical issue of perception, then, is what aspects of human (including social) behaviour are involved in each kind of affordance and how they work together in the actual situation. For example does IS perception occur separately from, or simultaneously alongside, HCI and psychical perception?
In the field of IS, what people perceive when engaging with affordances is "distinct possibilities for action" [Leonardi 2013]. In the field of HCI Norman [1999] distinguishes 'real' from 'perceived' affordances or possibilities, but Hartson [2003] argues that both are equally important and relabels them 'physical' and 'cognitive'. Turvey [1992] makes a similar distinction, between what he calls inherent and perceived possibilities, where inherent possibilities are prior to perception. As Gibson [1979] put it, "affordance is not bestowed upon an object by a need of an observer and his act of perceiving it. The object offers what it does because it is what it is." However, inherent possibilities are not activated without the agent's perception and action.
In most fields, inherent possibility is sparsely discussed and poorly understood, so Turvey attempts a systematic analysis of inherent affordances. He argues that possibility is identical with lawfulness, that affordances are also dispositions (tendencies to deliver the possibility under appropriate conditions), and that dispositions are prior to perception of them. Since he argues from a mainly physicalist position, the notion of lawfulness needs to be extended from the physical realm to those of of information and sociology, as we did above. Lawfulness is that which makes informing and social activity, qua informing and social activity of any kind, possible (even though these 'laws' might be deeply hidden and inexplicable). Hence the philosophical issue of lawfulness can help us understand affordance.
Critical Realism might be helpful in discussing inherent and perceived affordances, because it holds that there is a 'real world' but that our perception or understanding of it is always partial and biased [Mutch 2013]. Though Mutch actually discusses materiality and tries to argue against sociomateriality, in principle this approach might provide material for understanding possibility in affordance.
In the field of ecological psychology, normativity is usually ignored, or rather presumed in that affordances like 'eatable' etc. are usually presupposed to be desirable. In the HCI field, normativity is often about ease of use, so that affordances are widely recognised to be be good or poor according to whether they make things easier to use and understand how to use, or not, as in many of Norman's [1988] examples. This applies whether the ICT is organisational IS, expert systems, social media or games. False affordances are neither good nor bad in themselves, and may be deliberately used in games to challenge the player.
In the IS field, these normativities are relevant, but normativity is additionally and primarily about positive (beneficial) or negative (detrimental) repercussions in life. What this means in games (fun) differs from what it means for organisational IS. Though most authors ignore the negative possibilities, they are explicitly discussed by Conole & Dyke [2004a] -- risk, fragility and uncertainty, monopolisation, and surveillance -- and Majchrzak et al. [2013] -- such as that network-informed association encourages blind preferential attachment ("rich get richer"). Negative and positive might emerge from the same affordances.
Normativity is a philosophical issue, especially when we need to take its diversity of kinds into account; for example blind preferential attachment compared with fragility. Normativity may be understood, of course, via philosophical theories of ethics - utilitarian, deontological, virtue ethics etc. Application of these to affordance has yet to occur.
Merleau-Ponty appears to address normativity, when talking about "blurred" perceptions and "better or worse" [Telero 2005], but it is implicit and not discussed explicitly. Spina [2003, 47] argues that Merleau-Ponty's discussion of essence or ideal conditions of relationship to environment, as biological a priori, or of "structure by means of which the behavioural constants of an organism appear to an observer", is about normativity. The norm of X is the essence of X. This seeming essentialism is, however, countermanded by Merleau-Ponty's basing this on the certainty of the cognitive act of perception [Spina 2003, 47]. This is in danger of reducing normativity to cognition, which might be applicable to animal and artefact affordances but probably not to some of the affordances of ICT that relate to usefulness or even society. Faraj & Azad [2014, 254] argue that we need to go beyond the original ecological and perceptual focus in understanding affordance.
When something affords, it offers something meaningful to the agent. Meaning usually refers to the meaning that the environment item has for the agent: for example, climbability and eatability in ecological psychology, error avoidance [Hartson 2003] in HCI, and network-informed association [Majchrzak et al. 2013] in IS.
Empirically, the widespread attention given to meaning, in all fields, is significant, suggesting that affordance of all kinds cannot be properly understood without understanding meaning. In the IS field, "this notion of meaning can be seen as being at the heart of whether an individual makes use or does not make use of ICT" [Selwyn 2003, 109]. Philosophically, we can perhaps understand why meaning is important when we reflect on some of the issues that are important to affordance. It may be argued that diversity, possibility and normativity can only be recognised as diversity, possibility and normativity by reference to ways of being meaningful, and that relationships, activity and perception depend on meaning for their actualisation as such. Such arguments may be found in Dooyeweerd [1984] but will not be rehearsed here; the empirical evidence from the literature must suffice in this paper.
To the animal, climbing is meaningful in the sensorimotor realm, but in the realm of physics, friction and rigidity are meaningful. The environment is not a meaning-free realm. The affordance of climbing, therefore, is meaningful in two ways "psychical and physical" [ibid, 129]. One depends on the other. "Affordances," argues Chemero [2003, 184] are "relations between particular aspects of animals and particular aspects of situations". (Aspects are distinct ways of viewing things, ways in which things can be meaningful, from a particular realm.)
In the IS field, we can see a similar dual meaning in affordances. The affordance of mass collaboration includes meaning from the social realm and also from the digital, technical realm on which it depends. However, each specific type of affordance is also meaningful in a third way, related to the specific activity currently undertaken or desired by the agent. Zammuto et al.'s [2007] five affordances in Table 1 are meaningful to the agent in the social aspect, and to the environment in the informational aspect, but the specific affordance of real-time/flexible product and service creation is meaningful in neither of these, but in the economic aspect. Thus we might characterise affordances by three ways of being meaningful, three realms or aspects:
This constitutes a simple 'model' of affordance. It might echo Burton-Jones & Straub's [2006] triple of user, system and task.
This conceptual tool can be used to begin to tackle the diversity of affordances. The different kinds of affordance may be differentiated by the first two aspects, and the type with the kind by the third aspect. Taxonomies may be built by reference to the third aspect. It also offers a basis for critique of taxonomies or examples. For example, whether Mansour et al.'s [2013] commenting differs from Treem & Leonardi's [2012] editing might be discussed by asking "In which aspects are each meaningful? In which realm is the proposed difference between them important?" (Possible answer: in the realm of self-evaluation.)
This triple-aspect tool, however, does not give us a full philosophical understanding of meaning in affordance as such, nor its role therein. Moreover, to operationalise the tool requires a 'taxonomy' of aspects, of ways of being meaningful. Such a taxonomy itself must be grounded in a philosophical understanding of meaning as such, and in wide empirical input about meaning in the world.
Unfortunately, such philosophical understandings of meaning are rare.
However, across the fields, much discussion of affordance ignores the issue of meaning in favour of other issues, or disguises it by other words, or refers to meaning implicitly rather than grappling with it explicitly. Gibson and Costall are exceptions. Lack of explicit and systematic discussion about meaning in affordance is not surprising because philosophy has always found the notion of meaning challenging. For centuries it was largely ignored, or assumed (by Scholastics) to be imparted by Divine revelation and therefore not to be studied.
With pragmatism, phenomenology and existentialism, however, meaning has started to receive philosophical attention, but in all these there has been a presupposition that meaning is generated ex nihilo, either by attribution to objects, by signification of symbols, or by intersubjective exchange of symbols in conversation.
This might not be entirely sufficient for understanding affordance, whether in IS, HCI or ecological psychology, however, because, for affordance to be affordance, in the object is located meaningfulness to the subject. As Sanders [1993, 295, italics in original] put it, "significance is not merely attributed to otherwise 'neutral' things - or sense data - in the world; rather, significance is already found in the world in our most primitive encounters with it." In ecological psychology, affordances are "relative to the animal" [Gibson 1979, 127, his italics] and yet also located in the environment object, even though no animal ever actualises the affordance. How can this be? Gibson [1979, 129] tried to explain (with italics added to show the difficulty Gibson had in expressing what he meant to a traditional readership):
"An important fact about the affordances of the environment is that they are in a sense objective, real, and physical, unlike values and meanings, which are often supposed to be subjective, phenomenal and mental. But actually an affordance is neither an objective property nor a subjective property, or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us to understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, and yet neither."
(Value is often used as a synonym for meaning. Discussion of how value presupposes meaning must be left for another time.)
Gibson is countering the supposed assumption that "values and meanings" are less real. That the affordance, e.g. climability, is "a fact of the environment" as well as of the agent, means that the psychical meaning-to-the-agent of the environment is already 'built into' the environment as a possibility, before any agent is present. As Gibson [1979, 140] remarked, "The perceiving of an affordance is not a process of perceiving a value-free physical object to which meaning is somehow added in a way that no one has been able to agree upon; it is a process of perceiving a value-rich ecological object."
In the fields of HCI and IS, meaning-to-the-agent is likewise located in the "value-rich" (or meaning-rich) ICT environment or object, and is located there prior to any agent activating its possibility.
This, however, can be more difficult to see in IS and HCI clearly because much of the meaning located in the ICT is inscribed by the developers and users. This must be taken into account, before we can detect a third meaning, which does not have its origin in either developers or users. Take the example of social media. Majchrzak et al. [2013] suggest that social media affords four things that are meaningful to its organisational users (see Table 1). It can be argued that these meaning-to-the-agent possibilities are near to those designed into social media by its developers; e.g. metavoicing comes directly from features that allow voting and tagging. In addition, however, there are other possibilities that developers did not intend but users discovered, positive things like helping on the one hand and negative things like cyberloafing [Blanchard & Henle, 2008] or self-centred narcissism [e.g. Connell 2014] on the other. While it is the agents that activate these possibilities, the notion of affordance treats the meaningful potential for them as located in the ICT itself, and as there even if no user activates that potential - yet such potentials were not placed there knowingly by developers.
This implies that we need an understanding of meaning that does not depend wholly on attribution of meaning by the agents (users or developers).
This brings us back to Gibson's conundrum about subject and object, but in terms of meaning rather than relationship or engaged activity. As Gibson [1979, 140] noticed, "The theory of affordances is a radical departure from existing theories of value and meaning." Costall [2012] sees it as a "truly radical break with the long tradition of Western thought that has held that meanings and values are purely subjective and hence unreal." Though Gibson was especially interested in perception, Costall [2012, 89] suggests, this "put the epistemological cart before the ontological horse", and he points out that Gibson was still concerned, at core, with the ontological question of what meaning is.
In trying to understand affordance, we are challenged by meaning as an ontological, not just epistemological, issue.
This would seem to be supported by Critical Realism. However, examination of Bhaskar [2002; 2008] shows a rather sparse discussion of meaning, giving the impression that it is not seen as philosophically important. Bhaskar treats meaning as contained in symbols, and does not provide a foundation for understanding meaning as already 'there' in the object. Heidegger [1962] does discuss meaning ontologically, but argues that meaning arises from our mortality; that speculative suggestion is not particularly helpful in understanding meaning in affordances, neither of physical meaning nor of the diversity of meaning encountered in everyday living with IS. However, Heidegger is perhaps, without intending to, recognising some kind of meaning that transcends us, and by reference to which we live, rather than is attributed by us ex nihilo. Such an idea might help us.
Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception [1962] contains no entries in the index on 'meaning' - though his French word sense could imply signified meaning. We have noticed earlier, however, that he does recognise diversity implicitly, even though he tries to reduce it to corporeality. What he recognises is diversity of meaning. In his essay, 'Indirect language and the voices of silence', Merleau-Ponty [1964, 39-83] argues that meaning is not only that which is explicit in language but also that which is implicit or behind language; he seems to be reaching for something we live 'within', but it is not developed.
Chemero [2003] concludes that affordance ontology "is not a simple form of realism. It is a form of realism about meaning, in which meaning (affordances) is a real aspect of the world and not just in our heads, as indirect theories of perception maintain."
There is one philosopher, however, who does explicitly and deeply discuss meaning from an ontological as well as epistemological angle. Herman Dooyeweerd (1894-1977), who advocated reformation of philosophy, actually made meaning his starting point along with pre-theoretical experience. He argued [1984,I,p.4], that
"Meaning is the being of all that has been created and the nature even of our selfhood."
and explored systematically fifteen different ways in which things might be meaningful. His suite ('taxonomy') of aspects has been used in both the IS, HCI and sustainability fields (see Basden [2008] for an overview), by the present authors to enrich systems analysis [reference anonymity], and recommended by Myers & Klein [2011] as an alternative foundation for critical IS research. In a second paper, the authors will discuss in detail how Dooyeweerd's philosophy can address the philosophical issues that are important in affordance.
From this review, a number of main issues were identified in Section 3, which are important in understanding affordance and call for philosophical treatment: meaning, normativity, diversity, the agent-environment relationship, engaged activity, perception, possibility. These are issues that pertain in principle for affordance in all fields.
Although a number of philosophers have been linked with affordance, it is not yet clear that any can provide a full account that covers all issues. It cannot be avoided that affordance has to do with meaning, yet meaning has either been ignored in philosophy, or presumed to have its source either in divine revelation (Scholastic philosophy) or in free attribution ex nihilo by humans (Humanistic philosophies). Such presumptions need to be critically questioned.
A critique of meaning has been started by Dooyeweerd [1984], who presumed that we and the world exists and occurs within meaning. How this overcomes some of the conundrums and challenges presented above, especially with Dooyeweerd's radically different reinterpretation of the subject-object relationship, and how this may be applied to affordance is to be discussed in a separate paper.
While a set of important philosophical issues has been discussed, work is still needed on: philosophical underpinning of why each issue is important (to complement our derivation of them from the literature on affordance and philosophical discussion of how to understand some); how the issues relate together (rather than treating each separately); how they might apply in each field; how they relate to other issues meaningful in each field. That is for future work, and is partially offered in a forthcoming paper.
With a philosophical approach that can address each issue, other contributions become likely, especially if it is a single philosophical approach for all issues:
It is intended that a second paper will appear shortly that discusses how the philosophy of Dooyeweerd [1984] can address each of these issues, and will show, with examples, how the above contributions might be actualised.
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