(Key concepts: Affordance, agency, human/object-interaction, disobediant object)

(Last edited in Ulysses, June 29th, 2021)

My hand touches the cup, a white cup from Arabia Finland, with black decor of the Moomin running through a landscape. My thumb rests on top of the handle, towards the edge of the cup. Index finger and middle finger is inside the void created by the handle. My ring finger supports the handle from underneath, the pinky finger resting by its side. If I had to let go of fingers it would have to be the pinky and the thumb. But just for this situation, because I love my thumb and know that it is an important feature of human. But when your cup has a handle you don’t need a thumb to drink coffee. Actually, you could do without the index finger as well in this context, because the middle finger and ring finger are the protagonists now. The other fingers are nice to have for balance, fine tuning and more elegant gestures.

With a little bit of muscular effort, I raise my arm with the hand holding the cup. The lower arm is almost parallel to my chest, the hand a bit higher than my elbow. The shoulder joins in. It can be painful to lift a cup if the shoulder are injured. I have experienced this in relation to stress, and I would then try to keep my elbow as low as possible and close to the side of my body and try not to stretch out the lower arm so much.

The edge of the cup is approaching my lips, and I can smell the hot coffee. The edge of the cup touches my lower lip. I am trying to figure out how hot the coffee is by slowly tipping the cup a tiny bit towards me and slurp the coffee while inhaling air to join the coffee on its way into my mouth. The wrist is slowly twisting the hand holding the cup to enable the coffee to flow from cup to mouth. If the cup was filled to the brim, I would not tilt the cup, I would just let my lips do the work, moving towards the coffee, sipping gently. The less coffee contained in the cup, the more I have to tilt the cup to get coffee out. The same goes for my head; little coffee means my head can stay in a neutral position, less coffee in the cup means I have to tilt my head backwards. The muscles in the neck enable this movement.

It is the combination of tilting head backwards to get the mouth higher + tilt the cup towards the lips through twisting the wrist + adjusting the fingers to support the cup and enable the tilting (here the thumb and ring finger are especially important for balancing and tuning this movement, so I guess I should not underestimate the importance of the thumb even when the cup has a handle) + raising the arm up that enables me to enjoy drinking coffee from a cup.

I need a cup to be able to drink coffee. The cup should transport the coffee into my mouth in a comfortable and enjoyable manner. This is the affordance of the cup in relation to me in this situation. What is needed from the cup to fulfill this mission?

The cup should have a volume that suits the amount of coffee I want to drink, and that it does not get cold before I am able to finish it. This issue is a compromise with the fact that the cup should have a comfortable size to fit my hand. The cup should also be comfortable to hold. The handle enables me to hold the cup even when the coffee is burning hot. The surface of the cup should feel nice against my skin; both my lips and my hands. There is a big difference between a delicate, smooth, glazed porcelain cup and a rugged, uneven stoneware cup, or one made from plastic. The edge of the cup is also important for the experience of drinking from it; if the edge is thick and uneven it is easy to spill and feel clumsy while drinking. A super thin edge gives a delicate, luxurious feeling, but can also make you feel self conscious and afraid you’ll break it. I like cups that are somewhere in between these extremes; not too big and thick, and not to small and delicate. The cup should give a feeling of embracing and taking care of both the coffee and me. The shape, size, color, decor and surface of the cup all play part in the experience. A white, plain cup without decor gives a totally different experience while drinking from it, than a cup full of ornament, color and complicated shape.

My interaction with a cup can be summed up with the following affordances:

• -  A container to drink coffee from, that enables the coffee move from cup to mouth and nowhere else.

• -  Comfortable to hold, with handle

• -  The right size, both for the amount of coffee and for my hand to hold

• -  Smooth, even surface

• -  The right thickness of material keeping the coffee hot while feeling comfortable meeting the lips

• -  I like decor and ornament, but would rather like a nice, plain cup than a ugly decorated one

As I see it, the Moomin cup fulfills all the above affordances and has completed its coffee cup destiny . But what if the cup does not want to please me; does not want to do what is expected of it? What would the coffee cup destiny and affordance look like if the coffee cup was not evaluated by me but by the cup itself? Or if it was put in a completely different situation than facilitating coffee drinking? And how would the affordance change if we looked at it from the perspective of the coffee itself, or an animal or a plant?

To unfold what a coffee cup doing the opposite of what I expect from it (make me able to drink my coffee in a comfortable way) might look like, I start drawing disobedient and rebellious cups; cups that hurt you when you drink from them, cups that are difficult to hold or that refuses to contain liquid. Since the handle and the edge of the cup are the most important points of contact between me and the cup, they are also the parts most important to consider in the design of disobedient cups. I started drawing cups that really hurt you, eventually moving towards drawing cups that are not directly hurtful but just uncomfortable or trying to fool you. I start with the most obvious ideas, like sharp objects on the edge and handle, and go from there.

The images of sketches from June 2019 show a starting point for ideas.

To be continued.