Principlev1PR-339
Design physical and digital workspaces to afford only…
Design physical and digital workspaces to afford only the cognitive operations required for current work, removing all objects and applications that compete for attention, because every irrelevant stimulus in the perceptual field consumes neural processing resources that could support task focus.
Why This Is a Principle
Grounds to Attention as Gate to Conscious Perception (attention is capacity-limited with perceptual blindness to unattended information), Goals as Perceptual Filters (goals function as perceptual filters determining relevance), and Action possibilities exist in the relationship between… (affordances exist in agent-environment relationship). The principle prescribes deliberately engineering environments to present only goal-relevant affordances. Research on visual attention competition and cognitive load directly supports this.