Hammer, Hammering, and Affordance

The Materiality Turn and Artifact-centered Interaction

I got the inspiration for the above picture when I was reading Erving Goffman’s book Frame Analysis. He wrote a note about the meaning of an object on p.39, “Here again, I argue that the meaning of an object (or act) is a product of social definition and that this definition emerges from the object’s role in the society at large, which role then become for smaller circles a given, something that can be modified but not totally re-created. The meaning of an object, no doubt, is generated through its use, as pragmatists say, but ordinarily not by particular users. In brief, all things used for hammering in nails are not hammers.”

What Goffman talked about is normativity since he paid attention to “ordinarily” not “particular users.” As a particular user, I always use the stone and the small pink dumbbell for hammering. Of course, we don’t call stones and dumbbell hammers.

Goffman didn’t give a specific definition of “object”, but we know he intended to use a general term because he said “an object (or act)”. If we restrict the scope of “object” to concrete physical objects, then we can adopt an innovative view of the meaning of an object from Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson.