CONCEPT
The Affordance Audit
A systematic inventory of what a designed environment offers for doing — which actions it makes perceivable and easy, which it hides, and which it forecloses entirely.
The affordance audit is the operational first step of ecological environmental analysis. Rather than evaluating a technology by its features or intended use, the audit maps the full field of offerings the environment structures — salient and hidden, intended and unintended, constructive and destructive. For an AI-augmented workspace, the audit identifies affordances for continued prompting, immediate iteration, breadth of output, the perception of competence, and the absence of natural stopping points. It also identifies the hidden affordances — available but not salient — for pausing, scrutinizing output, engaging directly with material, and disengaging entirely. The audit treats the technological environment the way a field ecologist treats a habitat: as a structured space whose properties determine which organisms can thrive there.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The audit operationalizes Gibson's ecological framework for practical intervention. Without it, discussions of AI tools drift toward abstraction — 'Is AI good or bad?' — that cannot be answered because the relevant facts are specific and ecological.