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and cultural expectations. For example, in a pedestrian-centric European city such as Lyon, you will expect a degree of density and a mix of uses (i.e., commercial and residential) that are quite different than what you’d expect in a car-centric American city such as Houston.

      How do you experience a city as pedestrian-friendly? The environment in such a place offers cues that tell you what you can and can’t do there. These cues are called affordances, a concept introduced by psychologist J. J. Gibson in the 1960s.³ Gibson and his collaborator and wife Eleanor were interested in how organisms sense their environments. He coined the word affordance to describe how elements of an environment communicate the possibilities for action they afford to organisms that are capable of undertaking such actions. For example, to a being with opposable thumbs, a tree branch affords grasping.

      Your relationship with your immediate environment—and how you behave in it—is determined by the affordances it provides. Pause for a moment to examine your current demeanor in the environment. You’re probably holding this book (whether paper-based or in an electronic device) while sitting in a chair or couch in a room of some sort. As an artifact, the book has certain characteristics that make it evident as to how it may be manipulated. You can pick it up, turn it around, and put it inside another object (such as a bag). The same goes for the chair: its form communicates to you that it’s ready to receive your butt. It does this by having a particular shape, a particular height, particular materials, and a particular surface treatment that make it adequate for a being such as yourself to sit on.

      Imagine how different things would be if the chair’s seat were located 11 feet off the ground, or if it were covered in electrified spikes. In such cases, it would not afford “seating” to you. This is an important point: affordances are not inherent characteristics of objects. They only pertain to the relationship between an object and an agent in the environment. A chair that affords seating to you provides completely different affordances to an E. coli bacterium. To the bacterium—a microscopic organism with a completely different mechanical configuration and sensory apparatus—a chair does not afford seating.

      It’s important to note that affordances don’t tell you what the book is about; they merely tell you it’s an object that you can pick up and manipulate in particular ways. The book provides much information beyond this. For example, its cover may feature its name and the name of the author prominently, a designed feature that comes in very handy when trying to select a particular book from a bookshelf. The information conveyed by the book’s cover is an example of a signifier, “some sort of indicator, some signal in the physical or social world that can be interpreted meaningfully” in Don Norman’s definition.⁴

      When you’re walking on a sidewalk in a pedestrian-friendly city like Lyon, you perceive affordances and signifiers all around you. For example, the sidewalk itself affords you travel in particular directions at a safe distance from the large, fast-moving objects on the nearby road. The sidewalk doesn’t necessarily convey any meaning beyond “you can walk here.” There will come a point where the sidewalk ends, and you must cross a road in order to continue on your walk. The road has signals that tell the drivers of vehicles when they should stop, and tell you and your fellow pedestrians when you can walk safely across the road. These crossing signs are signifiers: they convey meaning to both drivers and pedestrians that influence their behavior in the environment.

       How You Know What You Can Do There

      The meaning of these signs must be learned. We aren’t born knowing that red means stop and green means go; these are social conventions we must internalize if they are to communicate their intended meaning to us. And knowing what the colors of the lights mean is not enough: we must also understand the social hierarchies and functional objectives of the environment these colors are enabling. For example, green and red lights have a different meaning on a Christmas tree than they do on a traffic light.

      A useful framework for understanding how this works was postulated by media theorist Neil Postman. Postman argued that effective communication required a shared understanding of the social relations between the agents that participated in an interaction, their goals in the interaction, and the particular vocabulary they used when interacting. He called this set of conditions “the semantic environment the agents were operating in.”⁵

      For example, think of the differences between science and religion. You participate in either field to pursue different goals: furthering your understanding of the natural world in the case of science and enhancing you spiritual development in the case of religion. You pursue these goals by using particular social constructs (the priesthood/layperson hierarchy in the case of religion and the peer review process in the case of science) and specialized vocabulary (the language of prayer and scripture in the case of religion and the taxonomies of particular disciplines in the case of science). Science and religion are two areas of human interaction that create and employ different semantic environments.

      For you to understand what is going on in any situation—for the communication to make sense—you must abide by the norms of the semantic environment that you’re operating in. Attempting to use a religious approach and terminology while performing scientific research would result in bad science. The semantic environment of science allows you to use language to pursue the goals of science effectively by constraining you to a particular context. Your agreement to abide by these constraints is what makes it possible for meaningful communication to happen in this context, and for science to happen at all.

      Often, these constraints are implicit and must be learned, as in science and religion. However, sometimes they are explicitly stated. Consider speed limits: there is nothing physically constraining you from driving as fast as you can down any particular road. But society has collectively agreed that some constraints are necessary in order to share the roads (goal) safely, so there are signs (a particular type of vocabulary) in the physical environment to tell you what the speed limit is for the particular stretch of road you’re in. If you exceed the stated limit, you run the risk of being ticketed by a law enforcement officer (social hierarchy). Thus, speed limits create a semantic environment that you use to interact safely in the roadways.

      

      Nothing about this sign physically constrains the driver from going too fast; its role is purely semantic.

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      Software, too, creates a semantic environment. When somebody opens a software application, she does so because she has a particular use (goal) in mind. The application also employs a particular vocabulary that has special meanings in that context. For example, imagine someone (let’s call her Lillian) opens Microsoft Word because she wants to write a document (goal). When Lillian opens the application, she sees a primary navigation bar that presents the following choices:

      Microsoft Word’s primary navigation bar.

      The words in this user interface—Home, Insert, Design, Layout, etc.—have particular meanings when used within Word. Lillian knows that “Home” here does not refer to her home in the real world. While its use in this context may not be entirely obvious to her at first (after all, “home” is a fairly generic term), she knows that in this case it’s being used in a way that is particular to Microsoft Word—even if this is the first time she has even opened the app. The same is true for all the other words in the navigation bar.

      Word’s primary navigation system also includes icons. As with the words above them, these, too, have specialized meanings when used in this context. Many of them may be familiar to Lillian, but that’s only because she’s encountered them before, either in previous versions of Word or in similar applications. These icons have specific meanings when used in this context. One of the challenges

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