Materiality

Material Agency

If materiality is the notion that the physical environment must be contended with both by social actors and social theorists, closely related is the notion of material agency. Material agency is more specifically the idea that the material world exerts an influence in social systems and social interactions that compares in some ways to—and may be an expression of—the influence of human actors. The word agency implies intentionality, which may appear initially problematic when applied to physical spaces and objects as opposed to people. But even things have tendencies and trajectories, if not actual intentions. Left to their own devices, the mold in the cellar will spread, the tree in the yard will grow, the hole in the roof will get bigger, tides will flow in and out cyclically, and so on.

When it comes to the intersection of such tendencies with social life, theorists and designers—following Don Norman—often speak in terms of affordances and constraints. An affordance is something an object enables you to do, irrespective of whether the designer may have intended it. If you’ve ever used a chair as a stepstool or opened a bottle on the latch plate of the nearest doorframe, you understand that the affordances of an object bear only a limited relationship with such intentions. Moreover, the affordances of an object are never absolute, but importantly intersect with the capacities of the user. A staircase can be a passage between floors of a building or an obstacle depending on whether or not the person approaching it is in a wheelchair.

Of course, affordances are only one side of a wider ledger, the other being constraints. Fences and railings, locks on doors, encryption placed on digital files: all of these are examples of technologies designed to constrain our actions in various ways. Moreover, they further demonstrate the relative nature of affordances—the lock on your front door is an affordance to you even as it serves as a constraint on potential thieves.

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