The Doorknob of Potentialities - A New Year's Message from the President of the Board

Welcome, fellow dreamers, dedicated tinkerers, and connoisseurs of the beautifully bent reality.

For years, I've been wrestling with design—the design of art, the design of a decent martini, the design of a neighborhood where the stop signs actually mean something. And early on, I stumbled into a term that cracked open the world like a misplaced coconut: Affordance.

You’re asking, "Can I afford it?" Nonsense. We’re talking about Can It Afford You? Forget the idea that a chair is just a chair. That's stale thinking. Affordance is the ongoing conversation between the object and the occupant. It’s not an inherent property; it’s the possibilities for action that erupt from the wild dance between a thing's potential and your unique, complicated abilities—right here, right now. A doorknob is a cosmic handshake; its shape invites you to grasp and turn, emerging from the evolutionary pressure of a million human hands.

Affordance is the realization that nothing exists in isolation. Every line you carve, every color you mix, is an ongoing negotiation within a complex adaptive system. The clay, your hands, the kiln's temperature—they all haggle over what, precisely, is going to become possible.

But here’s the dazzling twist for us artists and anarchists: You hold the power. Affordances aren't waiting to be passively discovered; they are actively constructive. When you approach a blank canvas and ask, "What's possible for me here?"—you don't just find potential; you create it. Your skill, your experience, your mood, your very engaged presence, pulls that potential screaming out of the material.

Key Point: Affordances are potentials, not commands. They are an invitation to possibility, waiting for your particular brand of genius to show up and say, "Let's tango."
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For the artist, this means your material is your partner, not your slave. For the customer, when you buy a piece, you acquire a new set of affordances—the ceramic mug affords not just coffee, but the quiet moment of warmth in your palm.

Stop asking what you can afford, and start asking: What wild, beautiful possibilities are we, together, about to create?
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Happy New Year, Kirk McCarthy. President - ACCI Board of Directors