Doing a Double Take
Rediscovering the parts of my environment I have come to ignore
Starting school at UT Austin four years ago, I immediately noticed the graffiti on the walls, the stickers behind stop signs, and the flyers scattered on telephone poles. They jumped out at me because these were less common sights where I had been living before college. I merely thought of them as a product of someone’s self-expression or even boredom. However, as I became accustomed to such sights through my college career, they increasingly faded to the back of my mind until they have now become virtually unnoticed.
When I stepped onto the UT campus for this project to find thoughtless acts, I rediscovered these familiar sights like stickers on the pole but this time with a new perspective. In this project, I used Don Norman’s theory of affordances in order to unpack and infer what was truly happening beneath the surface of simply stickers on a pole or graffiti on the wall. As such, I have come to recognize the balance between the influence that the environment and the people in it have on each other. More specifically, I have identified three types of affordances with varying levels of influence:
- Affordances that induce action
- Affordances that are only utilized when needed
- Affordances that influence while unnoticed
Some affordances induce action
When people enter an environment, they are constantly judging the affordances present subconsciously in order to determine what actions they can take. As they survey their environment, people will do things simply because they can. Such affordances do not need any initial intention from a person to be used. Rather, these affordances create needs or desires that the person otherwise would not have. With these new intentions, the person becomes very aware of the affordance and acts accordingly.
People instinctively draw relationships between objects with similar physical attributes. The circular shape of the soda Coca Cola cup and the yellow pole makes people aware of how they fit together. In addition, the yellow pole was short enough to allow a person to see that the pole was hollow to easily place the cup inside. Someone who happened to be carrying this cup saw the pole, drew that connection, enabling the action of placing the cup into the pole.
Most graduating UT students take graduation pictures in the fountain or in front of the tower, however, this student chose to take a picture in a relatively desolate location. The physical nature of the branch provides the affordance to be sat on for pictures as it hangs low enough to the ground to be accessible, and it grows horizontally, even dripping down like a swing, to be easily balanced and sat on. Noting the lack of other graduating students around her, I believe that this location is relatively unpopular for graduation pictures, including this student. I imagine that she noticed the tree branch as she surveyed her environment while she was walking to another picture location. The affordance of the tree branch became apparent to her, creating her desire to take a picture sitting on the tree, and inducing the actual behavior of stopping and sitting on the tree.
Some affordances are only utilized when needed
When spaces are appropriately catered for one’s needs, one can easily satisfy their needs, using their surroundings as they were intended. However, just as often do people enter this same space with intentions that those who designed the environment did not consider. In this case, people will often look to their environment, hacking it in creative and unimaginable ways to suit their needs.
Large trash cans are normally used to hold a lot of trash, and crowd control posts are used to direct foot traffic. However, the other affordances of these objects are utilized to fulfill the need to block off the entrance. Large trash cans are also heavy, and crowd control posts can also inhibit traffic when placed in a certain direction. As such, they are placed in front of the doors to prevent them from being opened easily, also indicating to potential visitors the amount of work and strength needed to use the doors, discouraging their use.
As students take graduation pictures, they are usually aware of their needs, thinking, “I don’t need this anymore, so I need to put it somewhere else.” As students act on their need to hang and store their clothes, the physical affordances of the objects around students induce different clothes to be hung on different objects. For example, graduation stoles are hung on the low railing between the stone pillars, while dresses are hung on a branch of a tree. The long, thin nature of the railing allows for items to be draped over it. However, its low height induces smaller, shorter items like stoles to be hung from it rather than longer, larger items like dresses or graduation gowns. Not wanting to get their items dirty, students can fold their stoles to avoid them from touching the ground. Similarly, the tree branch higher from the ground allows dresses to be hung without getting dirty. While people may be subconsciously aware that they can use tree branches or railings to hang clothes, those affordances are not used until circumstances call for them.
Some affordances influence while unnoticed
Outside the Jester West dormitory, flyers congregate on the wall since it is outside a hallway that students frequently walk past to enter their dorm. While the wall is a flat surface that creates the affordance to hang paper flyers, the gridlines formed by the wall tiles add an unique affordance that enables flyers to be placed in an orderly fashion. In addition, the variety of posters, some from events that occurred over a month ago, suggests the progression of time of people continuously adding flyers to the wall while maintaining the orderliness. While most people are aware of their intention and action hanging a flyer on the wall, placing them aligned to the gridlines remains relatively unnoticed. Instead, the extent of their thought process for this action is to just find an empty space and hang their flyer.
Similarly, the columns on the wire rack allows Pringles cans to be organized in a way for customers to quickly scan for flavors as well as keep the different flavors separated in their respective columns. However, the physical boundaries created by the rack’s columns are mentally extended in people’s minds. This is evident due to how the cans placed on the ledge of the shelf behind the rack maintain the lines of columns even though there are no physical restrictions. As such, the rack’s affordance to organize the cans on it is also used to organize the cans on the ledge behind it. However, to the market employee, he is simply lining up these Pringles cans in an organized manner.
My Personal Reflection
Before this project, I have always only thought about how people can influence their environment. We, living, moving beings, can design objects and create environments for ourselves to live in. However, from this project, I have come to recognize the misconception I had about the degree of control people have over their actions and how much our environment can influence our actions. For example, businesses intentionally put candy and gum right at checkout for people to more likely buy these products impulsively. UX/UI designers use large, colorful call-to-action buttons that stand out to draw users’ attention and influence certain behaviors. I think I was subconsciously aware of how much our surroundings influence our behavior, however, studying thoughtless acts and thinking about affordances made it much more apparent to me.
