There’s nothing in our world that doesn’t have an ‘affordance’.

An affordance is the ‘energy’ or ‘force’ of what a design asks you to do by its design.

Affordances are also learned and embodied from an early age as heuristics. So, as little children we learn how to hold a cup and drink, how to use a knife, how to sit in a chair and how to open and close a door. As children we learn these affordances through embodied gesture so that, we can live in the world efficiently without thinking consciously about engaging in all we want to do.

All affordances are unconscious and embedded in the design of our environment.

An affordance is what is offered by a space, place or object and also what is not offered by a place, space and object. You can stand on a chair, but that is not what it was designed for just as you can sit on a ladder. You can suck on a pen but that is not what it was designed for, just as you can write with lolly (sweet).

By the age of four years of age, children have learned over 100,000 affordances that help them live in the world efficiently without thinking (unconsciously). Once an affordance is embodied it becomes a heuristic (an unthinking micro-rule). You can read more on heuristics HERE

All learning works this way, progressively and developmentally, there is no fast and slow as Kahneman suggests. We discuss this in SPoR in our concept of 1B3M (https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/156926212). Learning an affordance (often by gestural mimesis) takes time and then more time, to become an expert at it.

I remember the slow task of teaching my children how to bathe, wash themselves, brush their teeth, do their hair, get dressed, be toilet trained and put on their shoes. Once the learning become embodied, the hard work ceased and heuristics took over. Just as well you don’t have to think about doing such things anymore!

A good place to start in understanding affordances is Gibson.

We can also create affordances through our use of language both in figurative (metaphorical) discourse and in its symbolic affordance (Halliday). I have written about this before (https://safetyrisk.net/curriculum-and-bodies-of-knowledge-as-instructional-affordances/). Our bodies of knowledge, philosophical (ethical) and ontological (theory of being) framework for living, also create moral meaning and action in the workplace. It is by these methodologies that we supervise, engage and manage work.

It matters a great deal what methodology drives your being in the world.

If you know your methodology then you will have a tight understanding of your methods. Your methods reveal your methodology regardless of whether you can articulate them or not. In safety, most can’t.

Your methodology (ethic) is the foundation for your principles of being and living. Principles are not slogans and slogans are not principles. One day when HOP decides to do some work on ethics it might eventually work out what a principle is. It might also learn one day to articulate a methodology. Indeed, it might one day go beyond slogans to understanding that each hides a principle rather than reveals it.

Even slogans have an affordance. That is, they contain in their rhythm and design, a certain energy and direction including, unseen by-products. There is nothing worse than grabbing some slogan (with the best intent in the world) without any consideration of its affordance or ethical by-product.

This is why Holistic Ergonomics is important. In Holistic Ergonomics (https://safetyrisk.net/holistic-well-being-in-risk-differently/) we go way beyond the design of objects and their physical affordance, to the nature of persons and how we live in the world. Rather than considering humans as just a factor in a system (human factors) we consider the nature of personhood in interactions in the world.

Humans are NOT ‘factors’ in systems. Humans are persons who create systems to serve being in the world. It then becomes important to ensure that whatever system, humanises persons, ethically and morally. Most often the systems we design don’t serve subjects but serve objects. This is how we end up with dehumanising workplaces.

An example of this is the absurd development of ‘Hot Desking’ (https://safetyrisk.net/if-psychosocial-health-matters-stop-hot-desking/; https://opal.latrobe.edu.au/articles/report/The_Effects_of_Hot-desking_on_Staff_Morale_An_Exploratory_Literature_Scoping_Review/26877511?file=48895486 ).

Despite all the evidence and research to the contrary, this practice continues and contributes significantly to psychosocial illness in the workplace. How strange then, that you never read any of these crusaders for psychosocial hazards, ever talk about hot desking??? Why would that be??? Because safety only takes on the easy stuff and certainly doesn’t want to be non-compliant to those in power with a focus on Technique (Ellul) and $$$.

This is the kind of selective discourse you get in psychosocial hazards ‘safety speak’ that is light years away from understanding Holistic Ergonomics. This is the kind of selective ethics one gets from an industry that is yet to work out what an ethic of risk is (https://www.humandymensions.com/product/the-ethics-of-risk/).

If you are interested in learning about Holistic Ergonomics then you might want to come to the Holistic Ergonomics conference in 4-6 February in Edinburgh with Dr Nippin Anand and Dr Rob Long. The details for the conference are here: https://spor.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/Edinburch-Flyer.pdf

And registration process is here: https://novellus.solutions/mec-events/social-psychology-of-risk-conference-spor-europe-2026/