Читать книгу Living in Information - Jorge Arango - Страница 19

Physical environments—buildings, towns, cities, parks, etc.—are designed artifacts, but we experience these things differently than other designed artifacts, such as iPhones and coffee table books. We experience buildings as urban environments that we inhabit; we move around and inside them, and their forms determine what we can do at any given time.

As we move through an environment, our senses register sights, sounds, smells, and so on. We slowly develop an understanding of the relationship between the different spaces that make up that place. We get a sense of what we can and can’t do there. At first, we must rely on our senses and think about what we’re doing. Eventually, it becomes second nature.

If you’ve ever visited a new city, you may have had the experience of being disoriented at first. As you move around, you register particular places in the environment: this is the hotel where I’m staying, one block north is the bakery with the beautiful croissants, two blocks further is the tram station, and so on. Given enough time in the environment, you eventually build a mental representation of the place. You no longer need a physical map to know where you’re going, since you’ve created a sort of internal map of the place.² You know where you are relative to other parts of the environment, because you’ve internalized the parts of the environment and the relationships between them. As a result, you also become more adept at making predictions about what you’re likely to find next.

You don’t come to this experience as a blank slate. Your expectations of how the place is supposed to be organized are set by your previous experiences and cultural expectations. For example, in a pedestrian-centric European city such as Lyon, you will expect a degree of density and a mix of uses (i.e., commercial and residential) that are quite different than what you’d expect in a car-centric American city such as Houston.

How do you experience a city as pedestrian-friendly? The environment in such a place offers cues that tell you what you can and can’t do there. These cues are called affordances, a concept introduced by psychologist J. J. Gibson in the 1960s.³ Gibson and his collaborator and wife Eleanor were interested in how organisms sense their environments. He coined the word affordance to describe how elements of an environment communicate the possibilities for action they afford to organisms that are capable of undertaking such actions. For example, to a being with opposable thumbs, a tree branch affords grasping.

Your relationship with your immediate environment—and how you behave in it—is determined by the affordances it provides. Pause for a moment to examine your current demeanor in the environment. You’re probably holding this book (whether paper-based or in an electronic device) while sitting in a chair or couch in a room of some sort. As an artifact, the book has certain characteristics that make it evident as to how it may be manipulated. You can pick it up, turn it around, and put it inside another object (such as a bag). The same goes for the chair: its form communicates to you that it’s ready to receive your butt. It does this by having a particular shape, a particular height, particular materials, and a particular surface treatment that make it adequate for a being such as yourself to sit on.

Imagine how different things would be if the chair’s seat were located 11 feet off the ground, or if it were covered in electrified spikes. In such cases, it would not afford “seating” to you. This is an important point: affordances are not inherent characteristics of objects. They only pertain to the relationship between an object and an agent in the environment. A chair that affords seating to you provides completely different affordances to an E. coli bacterium. To the bacterium—a microscopic organism with a completely different mechanical configuration and sensory apparatus—a chair does not afford seating.

It’s important to note that affordances don’t tell you what the book is about; they merely tell you it’s an object that you can pick up and manipulate in particular ways. The book provides much information beyond this. For example, its cover may feature its name and the name of the author prominently, a designed feature that comes in very handy when trying to select a particular book from a bookshelf. The information conveyed by the book’s cover is an example of a signifier, “some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully” in Don Norman’s definition.⁴

When you’re walking on a sidewalk in a pedestrian-friendly city like Lyon, you perceive affordances and signifiers all around you. For example, the sidewalk itself affords you travel in particular directions at a safe distance from the large, fast-moving objects on the nearby road. The sidewalk doesn’t necessarily convey any meaning beyond “you can walk here.” There will come a point where the sidewalk ends, and you must cross a road in order to continue on your walk. The road has signals that tell the drivers of vehicles when they should stop, and tell you and your fellow pedestrians when you can walk safely across the road. These crossing signs are signifiers: they convey meaning to both drivers and pedestrians that influence their behavior in the environment.