Creative Action: The Affordance — Supportance Cycle (a short note)
The Ecological Practice Approach to Innovation
This is a short note about the notion of “the Affordance — Supportance Cycle”.
This notion is inspired by George Nurijanian’s newest creation: The Lennyverse.
This is a fantastic story of creative action. I’d like to use it as an example for a possible book: Taking Opportunity.
So I use the Affordance — Supportance Cycle to frame the Problem — Solution pattern behind the story.
Problem: The Lack of Affordances
See the original copy below:
Lenny’s Newsletter is a Product Management phenomenon 🔥
But there are 100’s of posts by now 😅
They’re spread all over! Substack only lets you sort by Top posts, and do a free-text search. 🫠
And even then, you can’t find a post if you’re looking for a specific topic, and if you find one, you have to keep the tab open, or save it somewhere so you remember it later.
George Nurijanian perceived several problems with using Substack for Advanced Browsing.
- Normal Browsing: you find a post and read it. This is the normal logic of the “newsletter” category because it is defined for Updating.
- Advanced Browsing: however, some professional readers tend to jump from Normal Browsing to Advanced Browsing. They want to Read the whole archive!
Though many Newsletter services offer archives for writers and readers, they don’t spend energy to optimize the user experience of using archives.
The best metaphor for the “newsletter” category is Information Flow, not the Content Container.
However, User Experience is not about a definition of a category. User Experience is about the “Person — Product” Engagement.
What’s the essential thing behind the “Person — Product” Engagement?
Material Affordances or Techniqucal Affordances.
Material Affordances or Techniqucal Affordances are not Features or Properties of products, but action possibilities offered by ecological structure between objects and subjects.
For example, the following photos are about a carpool hangtag.
From the perspective of affordance, the part of the mirror (not the mirror) affords hanging something. However, hanging something is not a feature of a car. The part of the mirror is not a property of a car.
The action possibility of hanging something is offered by an Ecological Structure which is formed by the part of the mirror and the thing.
I don’t know the first person who found this “found use” and made a carpool hangtag.
Now it is a “conventional use” by many of us. For some people, it is a meaningful business.
A typical example of Digital Affordance is Twitter’s RT (ReTweet). Originally, RT is not an official feature of the Twitter platform, users just manually retweet by actualizing the affordance of 140 characters' input box. Twitter launched the RT feature in 2015.
Today, Retweet and Retweet with commons have already been added to the platform as official features, but the affordance of the input box is still there. The input box still affords you to do manual retweets.
Let me share an example. I saw the above tweet and manually retweeted it.
I copied the entire tweet and added “RT”, then click the “Tweet” button.
I posted a new tweet by manually retweeting the original tweet.
The high-level approach chooses “category” to describe Affordance, such as “persistence”, “replicability”, “scalability”, and “searchability”, these are categories. This approach is not for the tweet level analysis.
From the perspective of Ecological Affordance, I argue that a better way to describe Affordance is not using a “category”. As I mentioned at the beginning, the ecological approach considers the “Perception-Affordance-Action” loop. We should focus on people’s behavior first, then figure out the affordance between the behavior and the tweet.
I have to point out that Features are based on Affordances. If you don’t have an ecological structure, you can’t make a feature.
The Lack of Affordances means there is a horrible user experience because:
- The product doesn’t offer the Feature, and…
- Users can’t find an Affordance by perceiving an ecological structure between the product’s part and other things.
Users don’t have any choice.
Solution: Supportances as Alternative
What’s George Nurijanian’s solution?
I’ve done the legwork for you and have indexed all of Lenny’s newsletter posts (excluding community & podcast posts) in this organized Notion database!
🤯 It makes it easy to discover Lenny’s newsletter by topics (15+ topics so far, and growing).
😍 You can also filter by who you are: PM? Founder? Manager? Growth Lead? Don’t waste time sifting through posts that aren’t aimed at you.
👩🏽💻 You can make your own curriculum for a certain subject, work on your weaknesses, or just look around at your own pace.
George Nurijanian offers his Suportances to his audiences.
What’s Supportance? See the picture below.
Let’s consider it as a minimal collective activity. There are at least three people here, the two women carrying the frame, and a photographer taking the picture.
It is worth noting that any one of these three people is an indispensable component of the activity.
Without the photographer, no one comes to take this picture. If there is only one woman, she can’t carry such a big picture frame, thus this shooting activity — taking such a specific photo — can’t be accomplished.
The concept of Supportance offers a new perspective on social support and other social phenomena. I consider it a starting point for a new theory of social action.
The concept of Supportance refers to potential supportive action possibilities offered by a social environment. It is inspired by Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson’s concept of Affordance which refers to potential action possibilities offered by environments. Both two concepts are potential action possibilities. However, the concept of Affordance can be applied to both animals and humans and Gibson uses it for talking about visual perception. In order to discuss potential supportive action possibilities between a person and other people and social environments in general, I coined the term Supportance and developed it as a theoretical concept for the Ecological Practice approach.
The above chart represents the complexity of these ideas. Why do I emphasize the distinction between the natural environment and the social environment? There are at least four critical aspects that we can’t ignore:
- Rational agency
- Language engagement
- Ownership
- Remote presence
Physical artifacts and animals don’t have rational agency. They also can’t negotiate through language such as text. Artifacts don’t claim ownership of environments and affordances, however, humans consider ownership as a critical right for social life. Finally, humans can present remotely by adopting emerging communication technologies.
You can find more details in The Concept of Supportance.
The Affordance — Supportance Cycle
George Nurijanian’s story inspired me to develop the notion of “The Affordance — Supportance Cycle”.
I have used the pair of concepts “Affordance — Supportance” several times. In 2021, I developed the Concept-fit framework for understanding Platform Innovation.
The framework focuses on the Technology — Culture Fit. While the primary theoretical resource behind the framework is Project-oriented Activity Theory, I also used the “Affordance — Supportance” pair to understand the development of the Technological Field and Sociocultural Field.
The framework is part of my 2021 book Platform for Development. You can find more details in Platform Innovation as Concept-fit.
From 2020 to 2021, I often used the “Affordance — Supportance” pair in a hierarchical loop. The diagram below is an example.
However, we can adopt the temporal structure to use the pair of concepts too. See the diagram below.
In fact, the above diagram represents the dynamics of “Technology — Product — Culture”.
In this way, The Development of Products is the Objectification of the Development of Technology and Culture.
The “Person — Product” Engagement is the drive of Innovation.
Is this one an example of “Lack of Affordances”?
Feb 10, 2023
Not. This is a great example of the difference between Features and Affordances.
Linkedin offers a multi-option “Life” feature. You can choose one from “Like”, “Insightful”, and other options. However, your response only refers to the whole post.
Users can use the affordance of these buttons to associate with parts of a post. In the above example, the button “Like” is associated with the left option while the button “Insightful” is associated with the right option.
For readers of the post, the creator offers a Supportance for taking this affordance. If the creator doesn’t create the association manually, the readers can’t take this affordance.
Again, we enter the Affordance — Supportance Cycle
August 12, 2023
Source: https://twitter.com/IntuitMachine/status/1690477046718234624
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