Toward Environment Theory: Social Aspects of Affordances

Abstract

The article explores the connection between the social aspects of affordances and the normativity of environmental perception, referring to the theory of embodied cognition, ecological theory of perception, experimental design, information theory, situated aesthetics and disability aesthetics. The authors argue that distinguishing an affordance from the environmental background does not necessarily depend on recognition and may be associated with the perception of difference (which is facilitated by environmental variability). The main question about how the perception of non-normative affordances is possible leads the authors to the conclusion that the basis of such perception may be non-normative bodily experience (or its possibility), the carriers of which, in particular, are people with experience of disability. It is assumed that the condition for perceiving non-normative affordances in the environment is empathy towards the other who has different affordances, and this empathic access is captured by the concept of “third experience”. Illustrated by a number of examples from disability aesthetics, the concept of “third experience” acts as a guide for noticing and designing environments in which difference can be embodied without the risk of slipping into homogeneity on the one hand or diversity on the other.