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demandance

22 Oct 2025 - 27 Oct 2025
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    • A term of cognitive psychology coined by Jeff Shrager , Demandance
    • A demandance is a psychological "pull" exerted by a stimulus. It is closely related to the theory of "affordance". I introduce the theory of demandance, offer some motivating examples, briefly explore its psychological basis, and examine some implications of the theory. I exemplify some of the positive and negative implications of demandances for design, with special attention to young children and the design of educational products and practices. I suggest that demandance offers an approach to one of the persistent mysteries of the theory of affordance, specifically: Given that there may be many affordances in any particular setting, how do we choose which to actually act upon?
    • Whereas affordances "afford", or offer actions, demandances demand them. All people uncontrollably orient to bright lights or loud sounds. Infants are unable to resist sticking things into their mouths, and toddlers are the same way with candies. And, more subtly, just as Roger Rabbit was unable to resist Judge Doom’s entreaty, we expect the last note in a musical scale or familiar musical phrase, and mentally complete it when it isn’t completed by the musician
    • Many good examples, especially from the design of toys for very young children, where demandance is built-in, and kind of the whole point.
    • The practice of cyclists yelling "on your left!" – also a good example. I have sort of always been half-aware of the problems with this but still do that when I am the cyclist...at least I slow down enough to account for the notable time lag where the person figures out what to do. It's a bad Protocol and needs to be fixed.

    • Demandance and Protocols

      • Seems like the concept of demandance would be a natural tool in the protocol designers toolbox. A good protocol is one that exerts a degree of demandance on its participants. Continued with Claude

    • Routines and improvisation

      • The paper doesn't talk much about the phenomenology of demandance very much. What is it like to feel a demandance, how does such an experience figure into our everyday behavior? What are different emotional reactions to a demandance?
      • Resistance is the most natural, but you can also enjoy a demandance, relax into it, let it pull you along. In fact I would wager that most routine everyday activity is demandance driven in some sense. Both work (every dirty dish in the sink is a separate demandance for the dishwasher) and play (improvisation in music or drama is basically a process of learning to respond to demandances rather than executing preprogrammed scripts).
      • The "technical" term for this is flow – flow is what happens when you give in to demandance. Action without agency.

    • Symbolic demandance

      • Political symbols like the US Flag or a Nazi emblem do some of their work by emotional demandance – that is, they generate an involuntary emotional response in their viewers (not generally immediate action, but in some sense a potential for it, a call for it).
      • Advertising slogans and logos work the same way, although at much lower level of force. They may be intended to do no more than make you feel good about an insurance company, but they still call forth something, you can't see yellow arches without thinking of McDonalds in all its corporate reality.
      • Or is this stretching the concept of demandance too far? Everything has some effect on our nervous system after all. Everything we see elicits a response of some kind, what distinguishes a "demand"? That is hard to define cleanly, it seems to involve occupying a weird agential half-state. There are many signals but not all are perceived as pulls, meaning, we can imagine resisting them.

    • Anti-demandance (resistance)

      • Since we naturally swim in a sea of demandance (every advertisement we see is trying to get us to do something), we develop ways of managing and resisting them. That could be a whole topic in itself.
      • The Freudian theory of development is based on learning to resist demandances. Repression of infantile demandances is the very foundation of the self, and the difficulties in doing so the source of most psychopathologies.