Phantom Affordances

Published on: 2025-02-07

I remember when I learned the concept of affordance in design. It was one of those moments when I felt naming something gave me a sort of power over it and suddenly this vague concept that was just out of grasp, I can now manipulate in my mind in the light of ideas old and new. An affordance for the concept of affordances, if you will.

Being a computer user in the late 90s/early 00s turned into Emacs user since 2009, means that I got high on the drug of customisation. I think everyone that is a “power user” of sorts end up going into some path for it, be it scripting, creating their own tools or plugins for the tools they use, learning and tweaking keyboard shortcuts. Each of those paths, will open up new possibilities that previously didn’t seem possible or weren’t even considered. And once you make the connection of what could, in theory, be manipulable and in what way, you start seeing situations where you ought to be able to do a certain thing, but the tool that mediates your interaction with the medium is not built to allow that particular interaction.

And this is what I’m calling here a “phantom affordance”. There’s this invisible handle that you try to grip, you can almost feel it there and you know if you could use it, what you had in mind would be so easy to do. You sometimes can see the path that the already existing affordances provide for you to take to the same result, but that phantom haunts you by showing you how unnecessarily hard it is and how much easier it could be.

Of course, the fact that the affordance doesn’t exist, means that the “easier” path is probably the hardest. It can take you on an endless search for the perfect plugin or a different software suite altogether which will also come with a great amount of new friction. It can give you endless ideas of new tools that you could potentially build, if only you were willing to put in the time and effort, but frequently this cost of building would dwarf whatever time saving you might get out of having it.

However, I do feel sometimes it’s worth to chase that phantom. Even if when I give up along the way, efficiency is not the worthiest goal in life. I learn from understanding my tools better and my relationship to them. And every time I actually got to materialize one of those, even in a small way, it was a great feeling.

(*￣(ｴ)￣*)