Affordance

Affordance is... well using my own layman's knowledge of such things... supposed to be about outcomes of an activity, not necessarily the 'product' as such, but more like the butterfly effect (if you know what that is).
 my tale of affordance began 2 weeks ago when I made a chocolate cake for my friend's 20th birthday... (like in any good fairytale just imagine the sparkle sparkle sparkle that should go here).
So anyway the chocolate cake was a recipe from Sophie Gray's Destitute Gourmet cookbook. from memory I think it's called Dana's Chocolate Cake. It took a long time to cook (much longer than the book said) and I had to leave, so I left one of my flatmates (Steph) looking after it.
I got back a bit later on another (different) flatmate (Gwyn), and I discussed how we thought would be the best way to decorate it. I then decided that I was going to go to bed (I don't function well without my required 8 hours a night of beauty sleep) and do it in the morning (I like mornings). Gwyn then offered to do it for me that night and I gladly accepted, as I am not artistic (she is) and I didn't actually have any really amazing ideas on how to decorate it (like she did).
The next morning I got up expecting to see a beautifully decorated chocolate cake. And I did. As well as icing the cake Gwyn had also gone to the trouble of artfully making the top more normal-cake-shaped and filling it with jam, doing a much better job than I would have done.
I took the cake to my friends house (turned out he had a lecture and wasn't there anyway) and went back to the Library to continue on with my work.
There are many other parts to this story, including the part where I saved the cake from an untimely demise by a stormwater drain on harbour terrace,and the part where a lampshade fell on the freshly cleaned plate and broke it  but what really I'm trying to get at is that in this story the making of this cake was so much more than simply making a cake.  I managed to show my appreciation for my friend, show them that I wanted to celebrate their birthday with them, strengthened my relationship with my flatmates, let me recognise that I should step and let my flatmate decorate cakes in the future and many other things

So this goes to show that although the ultimate purpose was to bake a cake there was alot of other things to be gained from this activity. This is what we in OT refer to as affordances. 
thats all this time folks :)
Ciao