A concept from Keller Easterling’s - Medium Design where she describes it as:
“This book rehearses the faculties of “knowing how.” It asks readers to look with half-closed eyes at the world, focusing not only on objects with names, shapes, and outlines, but also on the matrix or medium of activities and latent potentials that those objects generate. It looks beyond object to matrix. It looks beyond nominative expressions to infinitive expressions of activity and interplay. And it looks beyond declared ideologies to undeclared dispositions—beyond the authority of economic or political labels that often obscure or misrepresent latent potentials in organizations of all kinds.”
“Instead, maybe it is only a little easier to see the world at a different focal length—to see, as if through half-closed eyes, a matrix or medium of undeclared activities and latent potentials. Through the very ordinary and practical perspective of chemists, cooks, and parents discussed in the preface, it is easier to see that whatever the content of each of the dilemmas described here, prominent above all is the tendency to form loops and binaries that obstruct change. That potential—that disposition—is itself the object of concern.”
I think of latent potentials as the affordances that are hidden and unexpressed in the object of analysis. It’s the spoon’s ability to hold liquid, the computer’s latent capacity to perform a wide spread of algorithmic functions, it’s the towels many purposes all of which are not known but which allow it to be so useful as to dry one off, but also block smoke from passing beneath a door.
The language of latent potentials is extremely salient. I’ve started to infuse it in my writing for helping me to think of the expansive landscape of affordances embedded within objects and processes.