Social-affordance removal

<p>Operators stripped the objects and layouts that make stranger contact cheap — dartboards, pool tables, dance floors, communal tables, bar rails — and replaced them with layouts that isolate arriving groups.</p><p>A booth, acoustic baffle, laptop-facing counter, or “no loitering” floor plan can leave the category name (bar, café, gym) intact while destroying qualifying function. The decline then shows up as function loss among surviving sites, not only as closures.</p><p>Correlate object removal with conversation initiation among people who did not arrive together, and with dwell time that is not tied to a single purchase. Negative markers (partitions, shout-over music with no shared activity, seats aimed away from others) should predict lower qualifying-function scores.</p><p>Fails if object-rich and object-poor rooms produce the same stranger-conversation rates, or if object removal tracks closures but not the social behavior of people still inside.</p>