A study in affordances

A study in affordances 

I say Jacques Tati's Mon Oncle as a young teenager and have since remained ecstatic about it. It's a masterpiece and a comedy - all I need to make me feel happy and full of admiration. Interestingly, much of the comedy is about human interaction with buildings. It bears many similarities with Gibson's theory of affordances and was made around the same time that Gibson was publishing his books on the subject. It might be a coincidence but I suspect that there are underlying reasons for the wider interest in human interaction with the world: the modernisation of the world and the emphasis on the individual following the Second World War. But even if it's a coincidence it's a film architects should study to understand how easily things can go wrong if one insists on one's one vision and forgets what the vision is about and for whom. In fact, I've been using extracts of the film to introduce affordances to designers. Comedy provides the best view to the human condition, a distorted and exaggerated one, but exactly for this reason the clearest I know of. Philosophers may give us transparent argumentation but comedy is so immediate that it can tell the same in a much shorter space. Thinking and discussing comedy, moreover, tends to be much more pleasant, too.