Today’s lecture was centred around the design concept of affordances, which was first brought into light by Don Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things. In a brief sentence, Affordances are an object’s properties (real or perceived) that indicate its possible functions to whoever is using it, which suggests how it can be interacted with.
Something that came into my mind during the presentation was the existence of non functional affordances. That is, what are the properties of an object that can indicate unintended uses without changing the literal function of the object at all. The immediate example that comes to mind is colour. The colour of an object can have real, tangible and deliberate effects on its uses. Traffic lights, for instance, only have intended functionality purely based on the colour of the three lights (red, amber, green). However, taking this further, can the colour of an object bring about unintended perceptions in the user. Imagine you were to enter a classroom where all the chairs were black except for one red chair. I would expect most people to avoid taking that chair, assuming it was red for a specific purpose. This might not actually be true, it could simply have been borrowed from another room where all the chairs were red, but just by virtue of it being superficially different, it would be perceived as having a separate function from an otherwise identical chair. This can be taken even further by simply focusing on spatial location too. Let’s say, now, that all the chairs are black. What if they were all stacked on one end of the room except one chair which is sitting on the other end of the room in front of the whiteboard by itself. It would have no added functions to the other chairs, it’s the same colour, weight, type, etc. From a design perspective, it is completely identical. I would guess that, once again, if a class was asked to grab their chairs when they entered the room, no one would go for that chair because, presumably, they would ascribe some sort of ulterior use / significance / importance to the positioning of the chair.
When trying to apply this concept to an instagram related concept, in keeping with the course content, its hard to imagine how these unwanted and unintended aesthetic affordances could impact a content creator and even harder to conceptualise how a creator would be able to plan for this outcome. Perhaps one way is to try and avoid colour schemes that may be linked to other brands (avoid bright red and yellow so you aren’t unintentionally linked with macdonalds, for instance). But one could also argue that this could be used in a positive way, by syncing your apps/photos/content up with the colour schemes, layouts, visual aesthetics etc with famous brands, content creators could unintentionally lump themselves in with bigger brands/studios and gain a wider audience by doing so. Youtube creators are probably the biggest proponents of this strategy, where youtube video thumbnails are incredibly similar across different content creators in order to trick viewers into thinking they are watching someone they are familiar with.