Recursive affordances

These two ash-tray found in Geneva and Lausanne are two impressive examples of an object affordances:

Cigarette ash-tray

Double affordance

Why do I blog this? This is utterly curious from a design perspective. the artifacts designed to received trashed objects looks like the object itself. A sort of recursive affordance to some extent. What does that mean? It’s actually not that recursive and the second example if maybe more self-explanatory since the two different garbages are next to each other. Besides, the first one has a little hole that only allow to receive small things like cigarettes.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 9th, 2008 at 7:25 pm and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Recursive affordances”

  1. Stéphane S. Says:
    February 12th, 2008 at 4:20 pm

    Can’t you call it simply a Rhematic-Iconic-Qualisign according to Peirce’s Theory of Signs ?

    (see http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/peirce-semiotics/#TenClaSig for instance)

    But I am not very sure of the relationship between affordance and semiotics.

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