Gilad Janklowicz, who died on June 9 at the age of 71, spent forty-two years coaching viewers through a screen. A former Israeli decathlon champion, he had moved to California to train for the Olympics until an Achilles injury ended that hope in 1978. He stayed, studied film at UCLA, and in 1983 launched Bodies in Motion, a daily televised workout that ran for some six hundred episodes. He is remembered as the man who got a generation moving. But the subtler thing he understood, about the screen and the body in front of it, is worth holding onto too.

Designers inherited a word for it: affordance. The term was coined by the psychologist James Gibson to describe how we perceive a thing in terms of what it lets us do. A flat plate on a door says push; a handle says pull; a chair offers itself to sitting before you have decided to sit. The object does not command. It invites, and the body answers before it has noticed the question.

The technologies we call media do this too, and more quietly, because they are thought of as carrying information rather than arranging our bodies. Yet each one arranges us. The broadsheet holds the........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)