On Treating A Computer As A Wastebasket

This afternoon we went into Pica’s office to download something from her computer, and as I had a scrap of paper to throw out, I looked underneath her desk and saw a rectangular object with light sides and a dark interior, so I started to throw the paper there. In fact this wasn’t a wastebasket but Pica’s Mac G4 computer.

These perceptual errors always make me think of the theory of affordances, a term coming from the renowned perceptual psychologist J.J. Gibson. To quote Donald Norman, “the term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. A chair affords (“is for”) support, and, therefore, affords sitting.”

Gibson explains:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment…

There is a language which objects communicate to us in. If you see a door with a flat panel rather than a handle on it, you know to push on it to open it. Boxes suggest opening them and looking inside, and if you’re a cat, laptop computers suggest walking over them!