Changing the way we think about designing stuff for kids. - Heft'sTaxonomy of Affordances of Children's Environments

I really enjoyed this article (see below - Heft 1988). I am using it for my paper, but I enjoyed reading it as a Designer. It was published 27 years ago, but I think the message in it has much untapped value.

The basic concept is that the world of objects and items can be viewed in terms of how we engage with them, rather than as the various names we have given them that describe their form, or shape or image. This is obviously useful for designers who are thinking about how to create an environment that will provide opportunities for people to do certain things. The theoretical concept is "affordance" (Gibson 1979). Affordance is the qualities of an environment or object that provides opportunities for behaviors.

Of course, how we behave in an environment depends on many things - children will behave differently than an elderly person, people who are in a crowd or part of a group will behave differently than when alone for example. That is part of the idea of affordance. The affordance is a combination of the human perception and the environmental features.

Heft in the 80's decided to further this idea by creating a categorization of objects based on their affordances rather than their form. So, lets say he was looking at a park, instead of listing "trees", "fence" and "bench", he would first try to understand it through the perspective of the person he was designing for. In this case children. So in this case his list would be "Climb-able", "squeeze-through-able", "jump-off-able" etc. Because this is how these things would be engaged with by a child. He created a sort of master-list or taxonomy by studying a few documented studies that had been done previously where researchers followed children around all day and recorded absolutely everything they did. Heft went through these studies and recorded every object that the children engaged with in terms of their affordances. He came up with a master list that describes all the objects children engaged with in terms of how the children used them.

I think this is really quite lovely. It is a shifting of perspective and a chance to see the world through the eyes of a child. In terms of design, it enables us to think about what we are designing and how every intervention provides opportunities for behaviors. I like the concept of re-coding familiar objects through another perspective. There has been subsequent work done with this concept (see Kytta or Ozdemir), but I think the opportunities for this type of thinking about design has many unexplored opportunities.

I recommend reading the original article if you are at all intrigued. My intro is very superficial, and it is a good read.

Gibson, J J. 1979. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Of Experimental Psychology Human Perception and. Vol. 39.

Heft, Harry. 1988. “AFFORDANCES OF CHILDREN’S ENVIRONMENTS: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH TO ENVIRONMENTAL DESCRIPTION.” Children’s Environments Quarterly, no. 3: 29.

Kytta, Marketta. 2002. “Affordance of Children’s Environments in the Context of Cities, Small Towns, Suburbs and Rural Villages in Finland and Belarus.” Journal of Environmental Psychology 22 (1-2): 109–23.

Ozdemir, Aydin, Mehmet Corakci, Aydin Özdemir, Mehmet Çorakçi, Aydin Ozdemir, Mehmet Corakci, Aydin Özdemir, and Mehmet Çorakçi. 2010. “Participation in the Greening of Schoolyards in the Ankara Public School System.” Scientific Research and Essays 5 (15): 2065–77.

I was thinking about these ideas as we explored a new park in our city - the new addition of the outdoor park at the "Telus Science Center" in Calgary.