‘The term affordance refers to the perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine just how the thing could possibly be used. […] Affordances provide strong clues to the operations of things. Plates are for pushing.

Effective communication will always require some degree of irrationality in its creation because if it’s perfectly rational it becomes, like water, entirely lacking in flavour. This explains why working with an advertising agency can be frustrating: it is difficult to produce good advertising, but good advertising is only good because it is difficu

our tendency to attribute our successes to a planned and scientific approach and to play down the part of accidental and unplanned factors in our success is misleading and possibly even limits our scope for innovative work.

The models that dominate all human decision-making today are duly heavy on simplistic logic, and light on magic – a spreadsheet leaves no room for miracles.

it’s easy to achieve massive improvements in perception at a fraction of the cost of equivalent improvements in reality.

Create a name, and you’ve created a norm.

If you want to solve the problem, you have to understand ‘the real why’. Some

confirmation bias, which leads people to seek out and absorb only that information which supports an existing belief.

Business people and politicians do not quite understand this and tend to evaluate decisions by the rigour of the process that produces them, rather than by the rigour with which you evaluate their consequences.