In design theory an affordance is the quality of an object that lets an individual do something with it. (To a cognitive psychologist this quality is the object’s ‘action possibility’.) Popularised by computer scientist and cognitive psychologist Donald Norman in his ‘The Psychology of Everyday Things’ (1988), an affordance can be understood as a reflection of the possible relationships among actors and objects.1 While Norman’s original formulation cast this actor-object interface as a human-machine interaction, the concept has been extended to encompass a much broader range of possible interactions—‘the world and an actor’ is one iteration—all of which contain actionable properties according to the perception and capabilities of the actor. If within the range of all possible actor-object relations an affordance is understood less as the answer to the question ‘how do I work this?’ than the grounds for the question’s articulation, can we not also speak of an art object’s affordance, of its ‘actionable properties’?
These questions are occasioned by ‘Untitled’, a recent collection of work by Katherine Moline which sought to engage with art history and the history and theory of design. (Moline teaches the latter at Sydney’s College of Fine Arts.)2 The work wore its interdisciplinarity lightly—installed in a contemporary art gallery, Moline’s objects nodded formally to post-minimalism while their titles signaled canonical debates in design history—but ‘Untitled’ is part of a larger project teasing out what the artist has described as ‘a tension between assumptions in the histories of fine art and design’.3 This tension might be figured broadly as the opposition between design’s alignment with rationality and art’s with imagination and is, as indicated, a subject on which Moline has written. But... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline