Affordances and Signifiers II: The Design of Everyday Things
In my previous post, I discussed the concept of routine and familiarity affecting intentional design in some capacity. The second chapter of The Design of Everyday Things discusses a concept that can explain human predisposition toward routine. According to the author, three levels of processing in regards to emotion and cognition exist: the visceral level, where conditioned and instinctual reactions take place; the behavioral level, where learned reactions and interactions take place; and the reflective level, where processes in the brain turn to conscious thought and we have to manually assess and evaluate circumstances, actions, and outcomes. Primarily, the behavioral level is what ties in most strongly to the creation and adaptation of routines. I think that routines, especially those that are self-taught, are designed in their own fashion, and these self-taught routines are heavily dependent on the behavioral level of human processing. For example, I’d like to discuss my nightly routine of how I brush my teeth.
- Pull toothbrush and toothpaste from where they are stored
- Squeeze a bit of toothpaste out onto the bristles of the toothbrush
- Run the water for a second or two and wet the bristles of the toothbrush
- Turn the water back off
- Brush teeth
- Turn the water back on and spit
- Brush tongue
- Spit again
- Rinse off toothbrush
- Fill cup halfway with water
- Take some water in mouth, swish it around for a bit, and spit
- Repeat 11 once, leaving a tiny bit of water in the cup, then dump the water in the cup down the drain
- Refill the cup
- Dump the water in the sink to rinse the toothpaste down the drain
- Repeat 13 and 14 twice, emptying the cup each time, filling the cup only partially on the first repeat and fully on the second repeat
It’s certainly a nightly process (and probably a little strange that I’ve analyzed my own routine this thoroughly, but we’ll go with it). Though some of the steps of the routine don’t make sense on a surface level (like keeping a little bit of water in the cup to simply dump it down the sink or the explicit number of times I repeat certain actions), each of the steps was purposefully added or modified in my nightly routine. At some point in time in my life, there was a feedback loop that reinforced these tendencies in the specific steps of the routine. Maybe the little bit of water in the cup left over is a relic from when I was a much younger child and I didn’t have a large enough mouth to hold as much water as was frequently left in the cup. Perhaps the number of times I repeat rinsing the toothpaste out of the sink was a process of trial and error for efficiently cleaning the sink that developed into a feedback loop over time. I won’t ever find out the exact reasons (or lack of reason) why I do certain things in my routine, but it stands to reason that there is or was at some point in time meaning to my actions.
I can’t say that any action that is a part of any self-developed routine has a completely valid and logical reason to why it was developed or added to the routine. However, most routines have a greater meaning that the individual steps of the routine aim to fulfill, and the simple act of fulfilling this greater meaning creates a feedback loop that the routine is successful. This feedback loop reinforces that the routine is successful, locking in tendencies to the human mind that may be or may not be efficient from an outside point of view.