Concept Of Affordances Research Articles

The adoption problem is a matter of fit: tracing the travel of pruning practices from research to farm in Ghana’s cocoa sector

Good Agricultural Practices (GAPs) are central to sustainability standards and certification programmes in the global cocoa chain. Pruning is one of the practices promoted in extension services associated with these sustainability efforts. Yet concerns exist about the low adoption rate of these GAPs by smallholder cocoa farmers in Ghana. A common approach to addressing this challenge is based on creating enabling conditions and offering appropriate incentives. We use the concepts of inscription and affordance to trace the vertically coordinated travel of recommended pruning from research to extension and farming sites, and to describe how pruning is carried out differently at each site. Our analysis suggests that enactments of pruning at the extension site reduce the number of options and space for interactions, and this constrains making the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. The conventions guiding and legitimising actions at this site, reinforced by sustainability standards, certification schemes and associated inspections and audits, favour standardised recommendations and consequently narrow room for context-specific diagnostics and adaptions. Therefore, we reframe the adoption problem as a matter of fit between different sites in the ‘agricultural research value chain’ embedded in the operational cocoa chain. Our contribution problematises the dominant framing of low adoption and highlights that the movement of pruning and the sequential enactment at different sites constrain the affordances available for rendering the practice meaningful to farmers’ repertoires. Consequently, addressing the low uptake of GAPs requires institutional work towards conventions that can construct a fit between sites along the agricultural research value chain.

COMPUTING NUMERICAL IMAGES OF STUDENT WRITING

With the rapid increase in the number of available digital texts in schools, new methodological approaches to studying writing development in education are now emerging. However, with new methodological approaches follow new epistemological challenges. In this article, I examine some of these challenges and discuss how they affect the role of computational linguistics within the field of educational writing research. The article is structured around three main sections. First, I position computational linguistics within the wider field of educational writing research with particular focus on L1 writing and K12 education. Second, I discuss to what extent methods from computational linguistics can provide us with new insights into different aspects of educational writing. Third, I discuss the potential of the concept of affordance to bridge between technology-centered and human-centered methodological approaches, and I relate this idea to recent theoretical developments in the digital humanities. Based on this discussion, I conclude the article with suggestions for possible directions in future writing research.

Reconnecting Religion and Community in a Small City: How Urban Amenities Afford Religious Amenities

Abstract Recently, sociologists of religion have argued that rather than treating geographical location as a mere backdrop against which religion happens, scholars ought to theorize how place characteristics influence, and are shaped by, religion. In particular, they focus on urbanicity, a key variable in the secularization debate. Drawing on interviews with 50 Catholic and non-Catholic residents of a small city just outside of Washington, D.C. along with participant observation data, I argue that one way to examine how urbanicity—and space and place more generally—matters for religion is to identify its affordances, or features of an environment that allow for certain lines of action. Specifically, I show how urban amenities can afford the creation of religious amenities that support religious practice. I also demonstrate how the concepts of affordances and amenities can be used to theorize place characteristics, and their relationship with religion, more systematically.

The Affordances of the Information and Communication Universe, or Who is Behind the Mass Media

This article examines the specifics and perspectives of the information and communication universe theory for the analysis of the mass media. The aim is to explain the application of the concept of affordance in the context of media theory. The term was introduced by psychologist James J. Gibson to describe the specific inviting nature of objects and events, which, through affordances, suggest an algorithm for subsequent actions. From this point of view, the information and communication universe makes it possible to use it for some important purposes for the subjects of communication. However, the quality and options for implementing the possibilities of affordance depend on the goals, interests and skills of the subject who is trying to work with this affordance. To use an analogy, the same axe could invite some people to chop wood for an old lady, and others to use it as a weapon against her in order to seize her pension benefits. The thesis on the functional usefulness of the category information and communication universe for the analysis of processes in the media system is put forward. Traditional ideas about the specifics of the production and consumption of texts are corrected. The author analyzes the affordances of the Internet as a subsystem of the information and communication universe. It helps to explain the radical differences in the assessment of network digital technologies by representatives of different research schools. The article outlines further prospects for the identification and use of hidden affordances.

Découvrir les possibilités du handicap à travers le spectacle socialement engagé

To expand Gibson’s concept of affordance, particularly “the possibility of action” (Gibson 1979), I propose considering embodiment as the given psychophysical circumstances before any external interaction between organisms and environments. It investigates how the physically-challenged individuals and ‘theatre novices’ learn to use their body movement and voice as tools to express themselves, and furthermore discover the new affordance of embodiment through the repetition of the training, rehearsal and performance.The research performance I am a Normal Person took place in August and September 2018 in Tainan and Kaohsiung City in Taiwan. Being the director and acting coach, I co-created the performance with the choreographer Yi-Chun Chen, and Chuao Chun who is a theatre novice with Cerebral palsy. I met Chuao Chun in the two-months and cross-disciplinary performance workshops with mix-abilities individuals. I see the performative potential of Chuao Chun’s bodily action through an exercise of falling in the workshop. Then the route from the collapse of movement to the release of emotion was revealed.By using the performance I am a Normal Person, I argue that “trans-pedagogy” and “deskilling”(Helguera 2011) can be the pursuit of the mix-modes of performing that was not recognized as systematic skills of acting and dancing. By the experiment of training and rehearsal methods, the performance discovers new affordances of disability. New affordances transform the performer’s self-image, but also the audience’s perception of the limits and possibilities of disability.Secondly, I argue that disability can be an approach to discover new affordances for theatre and performance making. Embodiment of disability disrupts the convention of theatre: for example what kind of body can be a dancer; what kind of body and voice can be an actor; what kind of skills are needed when the performance welcome uncertainty; what kind of technical supports and standards should theatre have, as well as the division of amateurs and experts, of the audience seats and the stage, and the relationship between audiences and performers.The intersection between disability and theatre can offer each other new routes to break through their social, institutional and historical conventions or stereotypes, invent new affordances, and act as the micro-political movement.

Visual Features and Their Own Optical Flow.

Symmetries, invariances and conservation equations have always been an invaluable guide in Science to model natural phenomena through simple yet effective relations. For instance, in computer vision, translation equivariance is typically a built-in property of neural architectures that are used to solve visual tasks; networks with computational layers implementing such a property are known as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). This kind of mathematical symmetry, as well as many others that have been recently studied, are typically generated by some underlying group of transformations (translations in the case of CNNs, rotations, etc.) and are particularly suitable to process highly structured data such as molecules or chemical compounds which are known to possess those specific symmetries. When dealing with video streams, common built-in equivariances are able to handle only a small fraction of the broad spectrum of transformations encoded in the visual stimulus and, therefore, the corresponding neural architectures have to resort to a huge amount of supervision in order to achieve good generalization capabilities. In the paper we formulate a theory on the development of visual features that is based on the idea that movement itself provides trajectories on which to impose consistency. We introduce the principle of Material Point Invariance which states that each visual feature is invariant with respect to the associated optical flow, so that features and corresponding velocities are an indissoluble pair. Then, we discuss the interaction of features and velocities and show that certain motion invariance traits could be regarded as a generalization of the classical concept of affordance. These analyses of feature-velocity interactions and their invariance properties leads to a visual field theory which expresses the dynamical constraints of motion coherence and might lead to discover the joint evolution of the visual features along with the associated optical flows.

Podmiot ucieleśniony w zaprojektowanym środowisku. Analiza wykorzystania koncepcji afordancji w architekturze

The subject embodied in the designed environment. Analysis of the use of the affordance concept in architecture: James Gibson’s ecological psychology is considered as one of the research subtraditions within embodied cognition. Gibson emphasizes the nature of the agent-environment interaction through the development of the theory of affordances. According to this idea, affordances are relational properties of the environment that enable a specific action for the agent. Currently this concept is being applied in many different contexts. This paper considers the application potential of affordance in architectural studies as a tool that analyses the agent’s interaction with the environment. In this context, the affordance category can be a tool that allows one to take into account the importance of space for the shaping of behavior and interactions between its users, without falling into architectural determinism. The main aim of this study is to analyze affordances as a category that, despite its diversity and vagueness, can play an important role in the embodied view of architecture (which integrates phenomenological trends in architecture and the results of neurocognitive research). The first part of the article is an attempt to synthetically place affordances in the context of embodied cognition and to point out the basic philosophical interpretations and discussions related to Gibson’s concept. In the next part, we situate the concept of affordances in the context of design practice. We also present the pros and cons of applying affordances to this ground. The last section in presenting the concept of affordances is considered within the background of the embodied current in architecture.

Join the Holy Spirit on Zoom

The COVID-19 global pandemic impacted all social relations, including the way religious communities engage in worship services. Due to strict social distancing protocols, the only viable solution for many congregations was online worship. This article investigates how platforms in cyberspace, such as Zoom, can provide a substitute for the core religious practices found in physical worship services, particularly for African Pentecostal believers who rely heavily on the aesthetic and sensory experience of their religious environment. Drawing on the theoretical concept of affordance, it is argued that digital affordances such as the chat box and emojis are used by believers to communicate affective moments arising from the sensory experience of worship. Members of the congregation become ‘digital spiritual hype people’ who render support to leaders in order to create and regenerate an affective environment where the presence of the Holy Spirit can be felt. The Holy Spirit, a fundamental pillar for Evangelical Christians, is understood as an embedded presence within the digital infrastructure. The internet connection, the phone and computers and screens are all re-appropriated as spiritual tools through which miraculous healing can be dispensed to believers in need. This research stands at a critical juncture between what might be termed the ‘pre-COVID era’ and the ‘post-COVID era’. As vaccination plans continue to roll out and social distancing measures are slowly being lifted, a ‘post-COVID era’ for African Pentecostals means negotiating the boundaries between online and offline spaces to fulfil core religious practices.

Sounds of Children in Worship: Materiality and Liturgical-Ritual Spaces

Bringing together concepts from the fields of material religion and liturgical studies, this article explores how adults and children manage sound-related affordances during worship. The concept of affordances—the possibilities an environment offers a person—is made sensitive to socialization and is related to the concept of liturgical-ritual space. Liturgical-ritual space comes into being through people’s participation in an environment and is therefore defined as a type of lived-in space. The analysis of children’s acoustic participation in two pre-Reformation church buildings shows how sounds made by children contribute to the creation of a liturgical-ritual space. It also brings to light tensions in how adults experience and interpret the sounds that children make. Attention to sound highlights the relationship between people and the material environment and shows that sound matters in Protestant worship with children, not only for the cognitive messages it may convey but for its affective qualities as well.

Embodying mental affordances

ABSTRACT The concept of affordances is rapidly gaining traction in the philosophy of mind and cognitive sciences. Affordances are opportunities for action provided by the environment. An important open question is whether affordances can be used to explain mental action such as attention, counting, and imagination. In this paper, we critically discuss McClelland’s (‘The Mental Affordance Hypothesis’, 2020, Mind, 129(514), pp. 401–427) mental affordance hypothesis. While we agree that the affordance concept can be fruitfully employed to explain mental action, we argue that McClelland’s mental affordance hypothesis contain remnants of a Cartesian understanding of the mind. By discussing the theoretical framework of the affordance competition hypothesis, we sketch an alternative research program based on the principles of embodied cognition that evades the Cartesian worries. We show how paradigmatic mental acts, such as imagination, counting, and arithmetic, are dependent on sensorimotor interaction with an affording environment. Rather than make a clear distinction between bodily and mental action, the mental affordances highlight the embodied nature of our mental action. We think that in developing our alternative research program on mental affordances, we can maintain many of the excellent insights of McClelland’s account without reintroducing the very distinctions that affordances were supposed to overcome.

Does the platform matter? Social media and COVID-19 conspiracy theory beliefs in 17 countries

While the role of social media in the spread of conspiracy theories has received much attention, a key deficit in previous research is the lack of distinction between different types of platforms. This study places the role of social media affordances in facilitating the spread of conspiracy beliefs at the center of its enquiry. We examine the relationship between platform use and conspiracy theory beliefs related to the COVID-19 pandemic. Relying on the concept of technological affordances, we theorize that variation across key features make some platforms more fertile places for conspiracy beliefs than others. Using data from a crossnational dataset based on a two-wave online survey conducted in 17 countries before and after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we show that Twitter has a negative effect on conspiracy beliefs—as opposed to all other platforms under examination which are found to have a positive effect.

Sustainability and innovation in constructions intended for emergency housing

The research aims to give a response to the emergency housing that occurs after catastrophic events by proposing a low-cost solution through innovative constructions. The illustrated solution - based on a living module composed by four adjacent sections that can be connected to each other or to new ones - combines the concepts of minimum and affordability with those of efficiency and sustainability.

Multimodal Navigation-Affordance Matching for SLAM

In robotics and mapping, prior knowledge of an environment can be included as virtual assets to a simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) solution. Borrowing the concept of affordances from robotic manipulation (i.e. virtual/interactive object models/primitives), this work addresses the fundamental duality in discrepancies between virtual and physical structures for localization and mapping. We propose a multimodal/non-Gaussian solution as a fundamental mechanism to leverage navigation-affordance assets during the localization and mapping process while simultaneously identifying any mismatches from the physical object. This allows the localization and mapping state-estimate more robust access to non-conventional and imperfect prior information about the environment, while computationally identifying assumed model discrepancies from imperfect sensor data. We use non-Gaussian factor graphs as modeling language to incorporate navigation-affordances with multi-sensor data similar to SLAM methods. We illustrate the approach with synthesized and real-world data from the construction industry where digital assets (such as drawings or models) are good proxies for how navigation-affordances can be generated and used in general.

Estimation of Suitable Action to Realize Given Novel Effect with Given Tool Using Bayesian Tool Affordances

We present the concept of Bayesian Tool Affordances as a solution to estimate the suitable action for the given tool to realize the given novel effects to the robot. We define Tool affordances as the “awareness within robot about the different kind of effects it can create in the environment using a tool”. It incorporates understanding the bi-directional association of executed Action, functionally relevant features of the Tool and the resulting effects. We propose Bayesian leaning of Tool Affordances for prediction, inference and planning capabilities while dealing with uncertainty, redundancy and irrelevant information using limited learning samples. The estimation results are presented in this paper to validate the proposed concept of Bayesian Tool Affordances.

A relational lens to understand housing affordability in the 21st Century

Housing affordability in the 21st-century requires a new way of understanding the concept. The concept is currently framed around household spending on housing costs. In the 21stcentury, households' aspirations and housing outcomes of local residential environments are increasingly influenced by external labour and capital drivers at a range of scales (regional, national, global). Under such context, this paper suggests the concept of housing affordability should be advanced to understood with a relational view of the world. The relational view, underpinned by Giddens's Theory of Structuration, has the scope to capture how households' housing costs, linked to aspirations and housing outcomes across scales, making this more relevant to the 21stcentury. Empirical evidence to demonstrate this has been drawn from a large-scale housing development project in the West Midlands of England. Increasing understanding of the concept helps formulate policies and planning practices for improving mechanisms to deliver better housing outcomes in an affordable and sustainable manner.

Feature Analysis

Many apps are designed to solve a problem or accomplish a task, such as managing a health condition, creating a to-do-list, or finding work. The solutions that app developers offer reflects how they believe that users and other stakeholders understand the problem. Each individual developer may have different ideas but analyzing many apps together can reveal the average or typical ways that developers in the set think about the problems that their apps are designed to solve. Building on content analysis, interface analysis, the concept of affordances, and speculative design, this article offers a new method that we call “feature analysis” to analyze what a set of apps designed to solve the same problem can tell us about the relationship between app design and ideology. By counting and classifying the features in a set of apps, feature analysis enables researchers to systematically answer questions about how app developers’ design choices reflect existing cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies.

Building the business case for green affordable housing

The emerging business-driven case for green affordable housing reveals six drivers of profitability: 1) access to international green finance flows for better financing terms; 2) minimized incremental cost through early planning; 3) faster sales through market differentiation; 4) savings on utility bills for owners and renters; 5) lowered default rates and superior collateral value for green mortgages; and 6) fiscal and non-fiscal incentives from local or national governments. Additionally, fiscal and non-fiscal incentives from local or national governments can further catalyse the market. Case studies from several emerging markets show that the right combination of government incentives (including non-fiscal policies), education and technical assistance to developers (including a no-cost option), and green finance (including green bonds and green mortgages) can transform housing markets. In order to reflect the total life-time cost of ownership, the concept of affordability in housing should include the impact of resource-efficiency and resilience on the costs and risks of ownership.

Nodes Afford Connection: A Pilot Study Examining the Design and Use of a Graphical Modeling Language

External representations such as diagrams facilitate reasoning. Many diagramming systems and notations are amenable to manipulation by actual or imagined intervention (e.g., transposing terms in an equation). Such manipulation is constrained by user-enforced constraints, including rules of syntax and semantics which help preserve the representation’s validity. We argue that the concepts of affordances and signifiers can be applied to understand such representations, and we suggest the term graphical affordance to refer to rule-constrained syntactic manipulation of an external representation. Following this argument, we examine a graphical modeling language in terms of these graphical affordances, and we present a pilot study examining how participants interact with the modeling language. Preliminary results suggest that using the modeling language, as opposed to prose representation, influences user behavior in a manner aligned with the graphical affordances and signifiers of the modeling language.

Sharing dark sides on game service platforms: Disruptive behaviors and toxicity in DOTA2 through a platform lens

Toxicity continues to have a strong presence in online environments. This is particularly true for digital entertainment like online games. Toxicity is an important topic as it impacts game development, consumption, popularity, public perception, and player health and well-being. Most of the existing literature on toxicity in gaming is descriptive and exploratory; it often sets out to map milestones and inherent drivers of toxicity. In this article, an alternative perspective is advanced, drawing from a foundation in media and culture studies. Data (streaming online chat, user-generated content, and forum discussions) were collected daily for 4 weeks from Twitch.tv and Steam channels about the popular online game DOTA 2. Results were processed with a content analysis relying on the driving concepts of toxicity and social affordance. The case study and related platforms were selected for their relevance and pertinence with the theme addressed. Findings point to peculiar interactive patterns in framing, supporting, and overturning toxicity and resulting harassment in these extended settings. Implications are noteworthy for scholars and practitioners who intend to shed light on how diffused audiences negotiate toxicity in digital gaming and beyond.

Rethinking sociocultural notions of learning in the digital era: Understanding the affordances of networked platforms

Understanding the affordances that networked platforms offer is a good place to start rethinking our notions of learning. The article discusses how social connectivity has changed, arguing that networking and networks have become foregrounded in how we perceive and experience our (digital) social worlds. Our aim is to understand the nature of networked structures, and the networked practices that these have enabled, to shed light upon how they ‘work’ for learning. While making use of the concept of affordances, the article discusses a selection of four affordances of digital networks (visibility, scalability, flexibility and persistence) and argues how these impact upon opportunities to learn through social media. The article finally critically reflects on how sociocultural theories of learning need expansion and revision, given social changes involving the rise of social media, but it also shows how this perspective leads the way in pointing to new challenges for theorising learning.