Look for
Scaffolds
Which tools, cues, layouts, conventions, interfaces, or environmental structures make competent action easier than it would otherwise be?
One way alignment happens
Environmental scaffolding and niche construction
How can changing the environment change what competent action is easy, difficult, or possible?
Agents can be aligned partly by structuring the environments in which they act. Tools, layouts, interfaces, resources, cues, boundaries, and built environments can carry part of the burden that would otherwise have to be carried inside the agent.
Try seeing it
The world can do some of the organizing.
A path channels movement. A label makes a distinction easy to recover. A tool expands the actions a body can perform. A well-designed interface makes relevant choices visible while hiding invalid ones.
These are not merely background conditions. They change the effective action space of the system.
Look for
Affordances
What actions does the environment make available, obvious, difficult, costly, or impossible?
Look for
Niche construction
How does the agent modify its environment so that future activity takes place under different conditions?
Mechanism caution
A supportive niche can also create dependence.
Environmental scaffolding can increase competence while making that competence highly specific to one setting.
A system that performs beautifully inside a carefully constructed niche may become brittle when the scaffold disappears or may reshape its environment in ways that harm other systems.
A useful perturbation