[Archive] The Supportance of Platform (Oct 27, 2020)
This is a document for studying the development of the Ecological Practice approach.
I started developing the Ecological Practice approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology in 2019. You can find more details about the journey in the following links:
- The Development of Ecological Practice Approach — April 26, 2021
- Curativity Theory and The Ecological Practice Approach (v2, 2020) — Oct 19, 2020
- Slow Cognition: The Ecological Practice Approach in Feb 2020 — Aug 31, 2022
- Lifesystem: Modeling Ice Skating and Other Social Practices — Sep 30, 2021
- The Infoniche Model — April 24, 2021
- D as Diagramming: The Attachance Perspective — Sep 17, 2021
- Ecological Practice Design (Book) — May 17, 2022
- [Slow Cognition] The Development of the concept of “Thematic Spaces” — July 19, 2022
- Life Strategy: Ecological Strategic Cognition — Dec 8, 2022
- The Concept of Attachance (A list of articles) — March 24, 2023
This post aims to share an email about the concept of Supportance publicly. On Oct 27, 2020, I sent the following words to an ecological psychologist and philosophist.
The email was a plan of developing the concept of Supportance.
I didn’t follow the original plan.
You can find the final version of my thoughts about the concept of Supportance here.
Hi Mr.X,
I have read several papers and chapters of your book. I really like your dispositional account of affordance. I once embraced the relational approach of affordance. However, your account is more accurate than others.
Also, it helped me solve a big problem in developing my ecological practice approach to the concept of platform.
The “Platform” I used here refers to two meanings.
First, it refers to the meta-theory level concept “Platform” which is a special type of “Container”. Initially, I used the Network-Container-Platform triad for my Curativity theory. Now, It becomes the foundation of the ecological practice approach.
Second, it refers to the empirical-level theoretical concept of “Platform”. For example:
- a social media platform, Twitter.
- a large company can be understood as a person’s career development platform.
- a robust theoretical tradition can be understood as a research work platform.
At the meta-theory level, I have a concept of “Containance” which refers to the reciprocity of containee and containter. Though Platform is born from Container, it is a special type of Container, I do want to highlight the difference between Platform and Container. Thus, I am looking for some ideas for describing similar reciprocity between Platform and its “users”.
One day, I read Gibson’s book and found that the idea is just there. The classical example of affordance Gibson offered is so great. Now, it points to a new concept for me: Supportance.
If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support. It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different.
At the empirical level, I recently started the project “Platform for Development”. There are many directions for discussing Platforms. I decided to choose the Development direction because I have my own personal experience and passion for this direction. The idea of Supportance can be seen as the starting point of the project “Platform for Development”.
As I mentioned before, I don’t like the re-conceptual works on affordance by researchers from HCI, Information Systems, and social media fields. Their works are just what you said, “…this is exactly like using the concept of gravity outside the field of physics for explaining phenomena that have nothing to do with it. Applying the label ‘affordance’ in such an inaccurate manner does not do justice either to the scientific developments in the field or to the empirical contributions offered by the discipline.”
I have applied Ecological Affordance to digital platforms such as Twitter at the technological aspect level with the package of Ecological Physics Method. However, I found it hard to apply the method to discuss interpersonal interactions on Twitter and other platforms. There are some theories about interpersonal interactions in psychology and sociology, but they don’t have affordance-like concepts. I also don’t like “social affordances” coined by some authors.
Eventually, I developed a new theoretical concept called “Ecological Offer” which is an affordance-like concept. Offers are reciprocity between two subjects. Inspired by a diagram from Robert Shaw, I built a typology of Offer: Self offer, Explicit offer, Tacit offer, and Shared offer.
The explicit offer is just a normal offer. However, the Tacit offer is selected by the perceiver, not intended by the person who sends out the offer. Thus, Tacit offer is an affordance-similar idea. Since Offer ties to ownership, language, and other social aspects, I think it’s better to develop a new concept than modify the notion of affordance.
After reading your writing about the Rylean approach of affordance, I found I can claim my concepts of Containance, Offer, and Supportance as non-naturalist dispositions. By adopting your account about affordance, my ecological practice approach has a strong philosophical foundation.
At the meta-level, Supportance indicates the key difference between Platform and Container. Platform has Supportance while Container has Containance.
At the empirical level, I develop an analysis framework and list four types of supportance:
- Material Suportance: Platform as environment
- Social (interpersonal) Suportance: Other Users as environment
- Cultural (program) Supportance: Events and Projects as environment
- Systemic (performance) Supportance: Collective data and activities of the whole platform as an environment
For each type of Supportance, I select corresponding theoretical concepts from the Ecological Practice approach. For example, for material Suppratance, I choose Affordance. For social (interpersonal) supportance, I use “Attachance” and “Offer” for theoretical explanations. I am still working on the Cultural (program) level theoretical concepts. Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings theory and Activity Theory’s Project approach are good starting points.
See the attached framework.
You have mentioned two reasons for endorsing a dispositional account of affordances, “first, the idea that dispositions come in reciprocal pairs; second, the idea that they are tendencies that at the same time are stable but they do not need to manifest constantly. Both ideas are tightly related to the way in which affordances are conceived: first, affordances are conceived as part of the organism–environment unit, which implies the entanglement of aspects of the environment and aspects of organisms. In this sense, EP starts from the reciprocity of organism and environment, hence affordances are aspects of the environment related to capacities and abilities of agents. For this reason, affordances can be conceived as reciprocal dispositional partners that are within the organism–environment unit, stressing the entanglement and reciprocity of organism and environment. Also, affordances are, according to Gibson, stable aspects of the environment (Gibson 2015; Reed 1996), but at the same time they seem to be quicksilvery, as Chemero and Turvey claim (Shaw, Kinsella-Shaw & Mace 2018). This means that there is a strange equilibrium regarding affordances: they are stable, but at the same time they seem to appear and disappear depending on the circumstances. This is quite similar to how dispositions or tendencies work: they tend to manifest from time to time, but they are latent most of the time.”
These two reasons also help me confirm the whole theoretical direction of the ecological practical approach. It also makes room for “Taking Supportances” which is the core of “Platform for Development”.
I hope I understand your ideas correctly and the Supportance idea is useful both at the meta-level and empirical level for the ecological practice approach.
Thank you very much!
Oliver Ding
Founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab)
In March 2021, I edited a book titled Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century. The concept of Supportance was officially introduced in the book
I also developed the Affordance — Supportance hierarchical loop which is the basic model of the Lifesystem framework.
On Jan 30, 2023, I also developed a framework called the Affordance — Supportance Cycle. See the diagram below.
You can find more details in Creative Action: The Affordance — Supportance Cycle (a short note).
