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When I was a junior in high school, I attended a recruiting event at my eventual alma mater where other high school students and I stayed overnight in the dorms with current college student residents. This experience was designed to give us a taste of what community in the residence hall could look like as we met new friends, participated in structured programming designed to build connections, and embraced the informal hangouts that would naturally arise from living in such close proximity.
I had a great experience during this event, even meeting the three guys who would eventually become my roommates my freshman year. However, I did not experience dorm life in the same way when my freshman year actually began for one simple reason: I was a member of our Cross Country team, so I had to go to bed very early (some nights as early as 8:30pm), to ensure I was ready for our 5:00am workouts. As a result, I missed most of the connection opportunities that happened in the evenings that I had received a foretaste of during my initial visit. While the dorm life advertised to me seemed great, many of its main opportunities for connection weren’t designed around a schedule like mine.
Design scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock offers a useful vocabulary for answering the question: Who did we imagine when we designed this experience? Three concepts—affordances, disaffordances, and dysaffordances—can help us examine more carefully what our own campus environments make possible, what they constrain, and what they implicitly require of students (Costanza-Chock, 2020, pp. 36-40).
Understanding Our Design
An affordance is what an object or environment makes possible for a particular person (p. 36) For example, a staircase “affords” movement between floors for many people, and a housing software allows students the opportunity to select their housing preferences. A disaffordance, on the other hand, constrains or blocks an action. This could include caution tape preventing students from accessing a particular staircase because a resident threw a gallon of spoiled milk down the stairs (I’m not still bitter about this!), or a housing policy that allows only certain genders the opportunity to select a particular facility. A dysaffordance is more nuanced in that it technically permits someone to proceed, but only by misidentifying or incompletely representing themselves (Costanza-Chock, p. 39). For example, on our campuses, this might include a form that forces a student to select only one racial or ethnic identity even though the student is biracial or multiracial. The larger point is that all systems contain assumptions about the people who are expected to use them, and those assumptions can be found in the affordances, disaffordances, and dysaffordances that are presented to their different users.
We can find examples of these in our campus systems. An evening-heavy involvement culture affords friendship, leadership, mentoring, and belonging for students with open evenings while making those opportunities harder for commuters or students who work. A small-group Bible study program may offer easy connection for students literate in “Christianese” and who meet a narrow definition of spiritual maturity, while leaving others uncertain about whether they can belong and be honest about where they are spiritually. Certain behaviors are permitted and prohibited, and only students who meet particular qualifications are eligible for some leadership roles.
There Is No Design for Everyone
The language of affordances can create an understandable temptation: once we identify who is struggling with a design, perhaps our goal should simply be to redesign it so that it works equally well for everyone. Costanza-Chock complicates that assumption.
Much design work aspires toward universal design: creating objects, environments, or systems that can be used by as many people as possible. Costanza-Chock does not necessarily reject this aspiration, but she questions whether any design can ever become truly universal. Different people encounter the same environment with different abilities, experiences, schedules, knowledge, and needs. As a result, affordances are never equally perceptible or available to everyone. Costanza-Chock therefore argues that design justice can help universal-design efforts move closer to their goals while recognizing that those goals are never fully realizable (pp. 38-40, 52-53, 66-67).
Our campus environments work similarly. Moving an evening program earlier may make participation easier for students who work nights while making it harder for students in afternoon labs or athletic practices. Creating different Bible studies for students at different stages of spiritual development may help newer students participate more comfortably while also limiting opportunities to learn alongside more experienced peers. None of those observations tells us by itself whether the design is good or bad. That is part of the usefulness of this vocabulary. Costanza-Chock explicitly cautions against assuming there is a single “best” design; the more basic task is recognizing that affordances, disaffordances, and dysaffordances distribute possibilities differently among different people (p. 39-40). Elsewhere, she makes the related point that designers constantly make choices about whose experience will require more or less effort; what matters is that those choices become explicit rather than remaining invisible (p. 55).
For Christian institutions, this is especially important. Our mission may give us good reasons to privilege certain practices, experiences, or forms of participation. Sometimes disaffordances are intentional, especially given that our institutions are not simply trying to accommodate students exactly as they arrive. Christian higher education is intentionally formative. We hope students will learn, mature, and (to an extent) become different people through their participation in our communities. The goal, then, is not necessarily to eliminate every disaffordance. Rather, it is to stop imagining that our designs are neutral or equally experienced by everyone.
Learning to See the Design
Before deciding that a student who is struggling to participate in our community is disengaged, unprepared, or simply a poor fit, we should ask what affordances, disaffordances, and dysaffordances our environment is offering to this student in the first place. Before assuming that a successful program works equally well for everyone, we might ask whose schedules, knowledge, behaviors, or experiences its design assumes. And when we encounter a disaffordance or dysaffordance, we should ask whether it was intentionally placed or simply something we have never noticed.
The following are questions that we can ask to help us see the design of the systems we oversee:
- Who did we imagine would participate?
- What does participation require?
- For whom is participation relatively easy?
- Who encounters friction?
- Which of those differences are intentional?
We cannot answer every design question with a solution that works equally well for everyone. But we can become more honest about the choices our environments already make. And that may begin by asking a deceptively simple question:
Who did we design this for?
Reference
Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design justice: Community-led practices to build the worlds we need. The MIT Press.
AI Disclosure
OpenAI’s ChatGPT was used to assist with editing, transitions, and readability. All of the article’s central ideas, arguments, structure, examples, and applications were developed by the author. The author accepts full responsibility for the content of this article.
