This is a practical guide for running participatory simulation sessions aimed at developing affordance judgment as a community coordination capacity. It is not a comprehensive theory of human development, civic transformation, or community revitalization.
The practice is described as an investigation because that is what it honestly is. We believe this approach develops real perceptual capacity with real coordination consequences. We do not yet have independent empirical evidence demonstrating that it reliably produces specific outcomes across diverse community contexts. Participants and facilitators are investigators as much as they are practitioners.
Treat what works as evidence. Treat what does not work as equally valuable information. Both are what learning looks like from the inside.
Affordance judgment, as James Gibson described it, is the capacity to perceive what a situation actually affords — what actions are genuinely available given the structural conditions of this moment, with these people, in this place. Not what we wish were available. Not what we fear. What is actually there.
In community contexts, poor affordance judgment produces specific failures: communities invest energy in directions the field does not structurally support, miss genuine opportunities that exist in their current configuration, and coordinate around assumptions about what is possible that do not match actual conditions.
Developing this judgment is not primarily a matter of better information or smarter analysis. It is a perceptual development — a change in how clearly practitioners can read the structural conditions of real situations — that happens through practice in conditions with real feedback, not through instruction.
The objective is not to teach people what affordances their community has. It is to develop their capacity to read affordances directly — so that what is actually available becomes perceivable to them without requiring someone else to tell them.
Affordance judgment develops through consequence-proximate practice — through acting in a field and receiving real feedback that informs the next action. Reading about affordances does not develop affordance judgment any more than reading about swimming develops the capacity to swim.
The simulation format creates the conditions for this development: a field with real structural properties, genuine uncertainty about what will work, and feedback that is close enough in time to the action to be informative. Simulations differ from real community situations in that the stakes are manageable enough to allow genuine experimentation — participants can try moves they would not risk in live community contexts and learn from what the field returns.
Community coordination is not an individual capacity. It is an ensemble capacity — the ability of a group of people to collectively read the structural conditions of their shared situation and act from that reading. This requires developing shared perceptual grammar: enough commonality in how participants read fields that their individual readings can combine into collective intelligence rather than just competing interpretations.
Participatory simulation develops this shared grammar. Participants practice reading the same field simultaneously, compare what they read, and develop — through that comparison — a finer and more calibrated collective perception. The community is simultaneously the practitioner and the field being practiced in.
The research framing matters practically. When participants understand themselves as investigators rather than students, they attend differently — to what actually happens rather than to what they expect or hope to happen. That quality of attention is itself the beginning of better affordance judgment.
These six vectors are the specific dimensions of a situation that participants practice reading during simulation. They are a shared vocabulary for attending to structural conditions that practitioners typically underattend. They are not a checklist to complete — they are questions to hold simultaneously while in the field.
During simulation: hold them as simultaneous background questions, not sequential checks. The goal is not to answer each one but to notice which dimensions of the field you are reading clearly and which you are missing or projecting onto.
In reflection: use them as specific questions about what actually happened — not what you expected but what the field returned when you acted.
Each session follows a simple arc: orient, engage, act, reflect. The specific simulation content varies. The structure does not. Keeping the structure consistent allows participants to develop the practice rather than relearning the format each time.
The facilitator's primary job is to maintain the conditions under which genuine affordance judgment can develop — not to teach the correct answers or guide participants to the right reading. If the facilitator is doing the structural reading for participants, the participants are not developing the capacity to do it themselves.
The facilitator's own affordance judgment is being developed alongside the participants'. Facilitating these sessions well is itself a practice of structural reading — reading what the group needs, what conditions to introduce, when to intervene and when to stay out of the way. Facilitators are practitioners, not instructors.
Retrospective reflection is a genuine component of the learning loop — not a separate activity appended to practice but the integration phase that makes what was experienced structurally intelligible. The six vectors provide the organizing questions that make reflection structurally precise rather than narratively general.
The distinction that matters: narrative reflection asks "what happened and how did we feel about it?" Structural reflection asks "what were the actual conditions of what happened, and what did we read accurately versus miss or project?" The second produces learning that transfers to different fields. The first mostly produces better stories about this field.
These questions are most useful when they generate specific answers — "we treated the time constraint as a problem to solve rather than a structural condition to read, which meant we missed the fact that the real constraint was relational" — rather than general ones. The facilitator's job in the audit phase is to keep participants in contact with specific structural observations rather than drifting into general discussion.
Does affordance judgment develop through this format? We believe it does. The mechanism — consequence-proximate practice developing perceptual priors that improve through feedback — is well-grounded in how perceptual learning works. Whether this specific format develops it reliably is what we are finding out.
Does improved affordance judgment improve community coordination? This is the central practical hypothesis. Communities whose members can more accurately read what is structurally available in their situation should coordinate more effectively. Treating this as a hypothesis rather than an assumption keeps us honest about what evidence we are gathering.
What simulation designs develop affordance judgment most effectively? This is an open design question. Different community contexts, different group compositions, different structural conditions in the simulation may produce different learning. We are developing this through practice rather than specifying it in advance.
Participants contribute to this investigation by attending carefully to what actually happens — what they read, what the field returns, where their judgment was accurate and where it was not — and by being honest in reflection about the gap between what they expected and what they found. That attention and honesty is the data that develops the practice.
A good simulation field for affordance judgment development has specific properties. These are not complicated, but they are non-negotiable. Without them the simulation will not develop what it is designed to develop.
Real structural conditions. The simulation must have genuine constraints — limits that are actually load-bearing within the session — not just stated constraints that participants can ignore without consequence. If participants can bypass the structural conditions without real effect, they are not reading a field; they are performing a reading.
Genuine uncertainty. Participants must not know in advance what will work. If the correct moves are obvious from the scenario description, participants are executing rather than reading. The affordance judgment develops in the uncertainty — in having to read the field to find out what it actually supports.
Consequence-proximity. The effects of actions must land within the session, close enough to the actions to be informative. Simulations where consequences are delayed, hypothetical, or mediated through facilitator judgment do not develop the real-time perceptual calibration that affordance judgment requires.
Variation across sessions. Repeating the same simulation develops procedural competence, not perceptual acuity. Each session should present structural conditions that are genuinely different from previous ones — different constraint configurations, different resource distributions, different contingency dynamics — so that participants are always reading a new field rather than applying a familiar solution.
The most common facilitation error is designing simulations that are too complex. A simple scenario with real structural properties develops affordance judgment better than a complex one where participants spend their cognitive capacity understanding the scenario rather than reading its structural conditions.
Start with a scenario where the structural conditions — constraints, available resources, real degrees of freedom — are clear enough that participants can actually practice reading them. Complexity can increase as the group develops shared perceptual vocabulary and the capacity to read at finer grain.
The simulation is not the point. The point is what participants develop by practicing in it. A simple field that genuinely develops affordance judgment is better than a sophisticated scenario that produces impressive discussion without developing the perceptual capacity.
Liquid Praxis develops perceptual and coordination capacity through Active Bloomology Tradescaping Facilitation and Heart Leverage Literacy training. The practice works with organizations, communities, and civic systems. Susan Hasty is available to facilitate introductory sessions, train facilitators, and consult on simulation design for specific community contexts.