Seminar 1: The affordances of a thrift store
How can we define the affordances of a thrift store? In particular, what is a affordance of Hey Betty, a Pittsburgh thrift store?
First, what is an affordance? The affordance, as coined by James j. Gibson refers to properties of the environment in relation to an organism:
The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill.
In my view, affordances are the possibilities of existence offered to organisms by their environment (including objects). In other words, how does the environment allow or empower an organism’s opportunities for transation or interaction with it?
I relate less to the object-focused definition of affordance Donald Norman provides in The Design of Everyday Things:
…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.
However, Norman’s focus on an affordance’s usefulness is helpful in a assessment of an artifact’s affordances. In Norman’s view, a well-designed affordance is one that effectively communicates the opportunities for interacting with it.
As someone interested in information design and used clothing, an analysis on the effectiveness of a major affordance of thrift stores seemed promising. I visited the vintage store Hey Betty for the first time for this purpose, and looked at the ways in which I could shop with regards to afforfances.
I’m using Gibson’s view in my analysis, which specifies an affordance as a invariant combination of variables, or a state. In this vein, I consider one of the key objects in the shopping experience, clothing racks, in terms of what they afford.
The clothing racks afford browsing of clothes. The clothes on metal and wooden hangers freely slide back and forth, affording your hand to slide the clothes on hangers to and fro. With the sliding motion, I can push clothes out of the way to view other clothes closely. I can grab the shoulder area of the hanger, lifting both hanger and garment, to remove tops and coats. You can lift hangers on and off of the rack due to the hooked shape of the hanger, which affords organizing the clothing through rearrangement.
The organization of Hey Betty’s clothing racks afford a sense of controlled discovery; the arrangement of clothing allows a shopper to discover vintage clothing while being able to use function, size, and cut (o gender) to target their browsing. Further, the organization affords efficient shopping, given the potential to avoid wasting time looking at items of clothing outside our size and type range.
The clothing racks are functionally clustered. For instance, footwear, coats, shirts, and other major categories of clothing are separated. If I were looking for dresses in particular, I’d be able to focus just on that section of the store. Items are also loosely organized by size. Plastic signs denoting small, medium, and large sections (in order) separate portions of the clothing racks. The racks are also spatially separated by cut (or gender). Women’s clothing was on one side, and men’s was on the other.
On the whole, the organization of the clothing racks affords navigating. Shoppers are also able to search for specific types and sizes of items using the organization of the clothes. The organization of the racks follows convention, allowing me to rely on previous shopping experiences to navigate the racks. They follow the cultural constraints (as described by Donald Norman) of clothing organization, at least by my experience in American stores.
There are some key aspects the clothing racks at Hey Betty don’t afford. In other words, further constraints that guide my interaction with them. First, some items aren’t perfectly in their own categories; the racks don’t always afford finding. For example, jeans are scattered across different areas of the store. Second, the organization of the clothing racks don’t afford the spontaneity of discovery found at more chaotic stores. Third, the clothing racks are occasionally full, and don’t afford the easy viewing or removal of clothes. My ease of searching and browsing in a guided way is hindered by the way the clothing racks betray their typical cultural, semantic, and logical constraints.
One clothing rack in particular stood out to me:
The clothing rack (upper) contained a large amount of jackets. I’m in the market for a jacket, a warm one in particular. The clothing rack afforded most of the behaviors I characterized clothing racks with above, but there are unique features to this rack.
First, the clothing rack is tall. I’m short (5'2"), and have to stretch to grab it, stepping on the tips of my toes. From this low angle it’s harder to take coats off the rack to measure them against my body. It’s also hard to determine the size of the coats because I can’t see any plastic size dividers on the rack from this angle.
Taking clothing off of the coat rack is another story. I’d like to pull coats off of the rack to check the size, price, and whether it looks good up close. The height of the coat rack affords stretching to remove clothing. Since the hooks of the clothing hangars afford a lifting action, I must stretch farther to grasp the body of the hanger to lift the item off of the rack.
Second, the clothing rack is fully stuffed with clothing. Not one more item will fit. I have to tug at the garments to pull them down. I can’t shift coats from side to side to check their inner tags (for fabric properties). It’s hard to see the coats, and I must push them with force to browse. The coat rack affords browsing and removing clothes, but with force and effort.
