Affordances 🔧 & Pragmatism 💵
How to get real and trust our senses
Summary
Last week’s experiment with a shorter format appears to have been a success! So for the near-term you can expect these posts to stick to 1-3 paragraphs for both the essay and the book review. This week the essay ties together the concept of affordances and the philosophy of William James. The book review looks at Getting Real and the business philosophy of Basecamp.
Affordances & Pragmatism
An affordance is a possible interaction that the environment offers to a creature. You might say that a a book affords reading, though it also affords holding. An oven affords cooking, but it can also afford burning your hand. Defining an affordance relies on both the objective properties of the environment, and the subjective properties of the creature doing the interaction. For example, you need to know that the oven is hot and that my hand will be harmed if I touch it before the affordance of ‘burning’ appears [1].
This idea complements a William-James-style philosophical pragmatism which believes that the truth of an idea depends on its usefulness. If pressed, many people would say that meaning is a subjective affair and perception is value-less. However, if it is accurate that our environment is defined by a set of affordances, this creates an immutable link between our experience and the real world. When we perceive an affordance it has a real 'cash value' for us. Put another way, the theory of affordances validates our perceptions as having value, even if only for our own survival.
This is important, not least because it offers a way out from the anxieties that come from a philosophy of subjectivity (and its more extreme cousin, nihilism). More immediately, the theory of affordances implies that we can effectively navigate the world without needing complex theoretical models. If our world is constructed of human-scaled affordances, then it makes little sense to look for superhuman notions of how to do things. We should not only have some trust in our senses but consider them primary as we explore our environment.
[1] The term affordances and the associated idea was first developed by James Gibson and later used to create a robust theory of design by Don Norman
📘 Book Review: Getting Real
Getting Real is the first book put out by the founders of Basecamp (then called 37 signals). In it you can see all the distinctive qualities of their writing. The language is forceful, the type is large, each idea is given its own loving, brief treatment. The story is simple: Work is about creating things that people will use. To do this you need to have the right people working together in the right way. That’s it. However, presented without any fluff, this can be a counterintuitive thing. To give a flavour of how this manifests here are two chapter headings with their summary:
Fix Time & Budget, Flex Scope: time and budget seem infinite until they are not, while what you create is definitively finite. If you don’t shift on time and budget it will force you to do the best you can with what you have.
Hire Less & Hire Later: Every hire without certainty of fit offers more risk than opportunity. Too many hires too quick harms culture. If you have a problem see if you can ignore it before hiring for it. When you do hire take as long as you need.
The distinctive aspect of Getting Real compared to other Basecamp books is that it has specific ideas to offer for building a web app not just running a business. If you want to learn how to run an effective business and gain a bag of tricks for app development, this is a good place to start.
Thanks to Casey Li for reading a draft of this newsletter.
