Notion Of Affordance Research Articles

Exercising agency through embodied research and the making of screendances

The politics of the home was often a focus in second-wave feminist art in the West. Influenced by Betty Friedan's The feminist mystique (1963), which challenged the notion that women were content to be wives, mothers, and homemakers, artists often represented the domestic milieu as a space of oppression. Friedan's ideas would, however, be challenged by bell hooks, who indicated that such perceptions assumed a woman who was middle-class and white. As hooks observed in Feminist theory: from margin to center (1984:2), Friedan 'did not tell readers whether it was more fulfilling to be a maid, a babysitter, a factory worker, a clerk, or a prostitute, than to be a leisure class housewife'. It should also be noted that Friedan's views were shaped by a US-specific context and that the politics of home, domesticity, marriage, or parenthood may be perceived very differently in geographies outside the United States or the West, more generally, including South Africa.

How Bogs Made for Borderlands: The Eastern Low Countries, c. 670 – c. 1900 ce

Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities.

Foot-related/walking macro-affordances are implicitly activated and preferentially guided by the framing distance of the environmental layout

As classically captured in the notion of affordance, the natural environment presents animals with multiple opportunities for action and locomotion appears as the privileged form of action to cover distance in the extrapersonal space/environment. We have recently described a facilitation effect, known as “macro-affordance”, for the execution of walking-related actions in response to distant vs. near objects/locations in the extrapersonal space. However, since the manipulation of distance was coextensive to landmark-objects contained in the environment and to the environmental layout per se, the relative contribution of these two factors remains undetermined. In addition, since the effect was originally described in the context of an incidental priming paradigm, it is still unknown whether it was specifically associated with an implicit coding of environmental distance. Here, across three experiments, we examined the degree to which the “macro-affordance” effect reflects (i) the encoding of environmental vs. landmark-objects’ distance, (ii) the involvement of an implicit vs. controlled system, (iii) a foot-effector specificity. The results showed that the “macro-affordance” effect is more efficiently triggered by the framing distance of the environmental layout (far/wide/panoramic vs. near/close/restricted) rather than of isolated landmark-objects in the environment and that it only emerges when the distance dimension is implicitly processed within the incidental priming paradigm. The results additionally suggested a specificity of the effect for foot- vs. hand-related actions. The present findings suggest that macro-affordances reflect an implicit coding of spatial features of the environmental layout and viewer–environment relationships that preferentially guide a walking-related exploration of the spatial environment.

Teacher Roles in Promoting Out-Of-Class Learning: Lessons from a Spanish For Specific Purposes Course

In this paper, I discuss a small-scale case study that explores the important role teachers play in promoting out-of-class learning among their students. Data come from in-depth interviews with three of the teachers who delivered a Spanish for specific purposes blended course. I explored the different ways in which these teachers went about encouraging students to engage with the online segment of the course. The study is mainly informed by the notion of affordances (Cotterall, 2017; Murray, 2017; van Lier, 2004) and the growing body of literature on learning beyond the classroom (LBC) (Benson, 2011; Reinders & Benson, 2017; Reinders, 2020) where teachers play a pivotal role in promoting out-of-class learning. The main takeaway from this study is that for teachers to promote out-of-class learning, they should first identify the learning possibilities available in whatever materials students are to use outside of the classroom. In the case of this study, teachers had to promote the use of the learning platform that students were supposed to engage with as part of their out-of-class learning segment of the course. However, I found that only one teacher fully promoted out-of-class learning simply because she saw value in the platform and was able to help students see such value as well. The opposite was also true; the other two teachers did not seem to see much value in the platform and as a result, they were not entirely successful in promoting out-of-class learning among their students.

Tackling rapid technology changes by applying enterprise engineering theories

• Applied enterprise engineering theories help to build evolvable software. • The notion of affordance can help to separate function from construction of a software system. • Combinatorial effects reduced when building system using the Affordance-Driven Assembling. Moore's law states that the number of transistors on a chip will double every two years. A similar force appears to drive the progress of information technology (IT). IT companies tend to struggle to keep up with the latest technological developments, and software solutions are becoming increasingly outdated. The ability for software to change easily is defined as evolvability. One of the major fields researching evolvability is enterprise engineering (EE). The EE research paradigm applies theories from other fields to the evolvability of organisations. We argue that such theories can be applied to software engineering (SE) as well, which can contribute to the construction of software with a clear separation of dynamically changing technologies based on a relatively stable description of functions required for a specific user. EE theories introduce notions of function, construction, and affordance. We reify these concepts in terms of SE. Based on this reification, we propose affordance-driven assembling (ADA) as a software design approach that can aid in the construction of more evolvable software solutions. We exemplify the implementation of ADA in a case study on a commercial system and measure its effectiveness in terms of the impact of changes, as defined by the normalised systems theory.

How Bogs Made for Borderlands: The Eastern Low Countries, c. 670 – c. 1900 ce

Scholars have radically turned away from the notion of ‘natural borders’ dictated by nature and now broadly agree that all borders are ‘artificial’ human constructs. However, there is a need to revisit environmental determinism in its nuances. We analyse the relation between distinct natural features and historical border development, using the notion of affordances and the example of raised bogs in the medieval and modern-period eastern Low Countries. For humans, bog landscapes in these periods functioned as both barriers and passageways through the spatiotemporal variability of these opposite affordances. At the scale of local settlement territories, large bog landscapes had the coercive agency to function as borderlands separating adjacent communities. Such coercion was absent on the larger spatial scale of princedoms. The growing economic importance of peat was a crucial driver for border demarcation at both scales from the late Middle Ages. Diplomatic risk calculation and path dependency explain the spatial concurrence and long persistence respectively of bog boundaries between successive polities.

When tools ‘bite first’: How tools-for-reflection (do not) afford reflection and knowledge creation

The paper delineates how our understanding of reflection and knowledge development changes, if we drop the widespread assumption that objects such as tools merely ‘talk back’ (Schön) or ‘bite back’ (Engeström & Blackler) when humans use them. By drawing on the notion of affordances, the paper provides an account of how tools ‘bite first’, which means that their materiality pre-reflectively affords certain patterns of thinking and acting as well as affective states while others are less likely. My 12-month action ethnography basically offers three insights. First, my findings indicate that a tool’s materiality which affords flexibility, complexity, embodied engagement, and happiness is more likely enacted as ‘facilitative reflection’, a type of reflection that results in knowledge creation. Second, if a tool’s materiality affords less flexibility, an entity-focus, detached interaction, and frustration, ‘oppositional reflection’ is enacted, a second type of reflection that does not result in knowledge creation. Since only ‘facilitative reflection’ results in knowledge creation, the affordances-based account of tools-for-reflection also challenges the widespread argument that reflection leads to knowledge creation. Third, I offer some fresh insights into the relation between a tool’s materiality, breakdowns, and associated affective states.

Representing and Embodying a Peripheral City’s Place in the World

ABSTRACT In an increasingly globalizing world, the aesthetics of Dubai have become potentially available even for impoverished, peripheral cities such as Belgrade. With the explicit rhetoric of finally achieving a “global profile” for the city, the Serbian government has hired an Emirati company to build a “world city” in a centrally located district of Belgrade. The rationale for the development is explicitly aesthetic, and the high-rises planned articulate the globally recognizable aesthetic vocabulary of superlatives and (generic) modernity. The tall buildings suggest economic growth while forming a façade against which Belgraders play the role of extras. This paper builds on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body schema as well as James J. Gibson’s notion of affordances and recent contributions to architectural aesthetics that grew from it, to outline an alternative, embodied ideal of urban aesthetics. The paper presupposes that the common world is to be understood as a task to be achieved. The city, understood in its material form, as urbs, as well as in terms of social relations, as civitas, is the place where the common world can potentially be tangibly experienced. Its architecture narrates, but also affords and prohibits social change, and reversely social and political relations influence the making of the material city. The paper argues that a city’s place in the world is not a matter of gaining access to a supposedly pre-existing reality by displaying the right look, but of engaging actively in the making of the common world.

Парниковый эффект и его воздействие на окружающую среду

The buildup of so-called «greenhouse gases» in the atmosphere - CO2 in particular-appears to be having an adverse impact on the global climate. This article briefly reviews current expectations with regard to physical and biological effects, their potential costs to society, and likely costs of abatement. For a «worst case» scenario it is impossible to assess, in economic terms, the full range of possible non-linear synergistic effects. In the «most favorable» case, however, it seems likely that the impacts are within the «affordable» range, at least in the industrialized countries of the world. In the «third world» the notion of affordability is of doubtful relevance, making the problem of quantitative evaluation almost impossible.

Ecological Psychology and Enactivism: A Normative Way Out From Ontological Dilemmas.

Two important issues of recent discussion in the philosophy of biology and of the cognitive sciences have been the ontological status of living, cognitive agents and whether cognition and action have a normative character per se. In this paper I will explore the following conditional in relation with both the notion of affordance and the idea of the living as self-creation: if we recognize the need to use normative vocabulary to make sense of life in general, we are better off avoiding taking sides on the ontological discussion between eliminativists, reductionists and emergentists. Looking at life through normative lenses is, at the very least, in tension with any kind of realism that aims at prediction and control. I will argue that this is so for two separate reasons. On the one hand, understanding the realm of biology in purely factualist, realist terms means to dispossess it of its dignity: there is more to life than something that we simply aim to manipulate to our own material convenience. On the other hand, a descriptivist view that is committed to the existence of biological and mental facts that are fully independent of our understanding of nature may be an invitation to make our ethical and normative judgments dependent on the discovery of such alleged facts, something I diagnose as a form of representationalism. This runs counter what I take to be a central democratic ideal: while there are experts whose opinion could be considered the last word on purely factual matters, where value is concerned, there are no technocratic experts above the rest of us. I will rely on the ideas of some central figures of early analytic philosophy that, perhaps due to the reductionistic and eliminativist tendencies of contemporary philosophy of mind, have not been sufficiently discussed within post-cognitivist debates.

Embodiment of Going Downhill: Scaffolding of Movement Experience

Psychology needs to view the human being in its full reality—which is constant movement. This is rarely taken in account in theories that usually deal with static ontologies of being. This paper outlines a way of how to grasp the complex reality of downhill skiing from a psychological point of view. The theoretical background for the study of how parents instruct their children in acquisition of skills and feelings into the practice of Alpine skiing is explained. First empirical outcome is also discussed in the light of those theories. A combination of empirical and theoretical work is needed to provide sufficient explanation of the reality of downhill skiing. This is done by combining different theories—those of embodiment of actions Gibson’s notion of affordances, holistic psychology and the totality of the environment (Ganzheitspsychologie tradition). The social guidance of children’s skill development while skiing is analysed from the perspective of scaffolding. The combination of different views complemented with empirical data such as videos and interviews is a first step towards understanding the individual experience of downhill skiing.

Affordances na interação online de aprendizes de inglês na modalidade Educação a Distância

The main objective of this research was to describe the mechanisms for engagement with affordances that help to sustain written interpersonal interactions of students in online discussion forums of a virtual learning environment while they were learning English as a foreign language. The notion of affordance was discussed in this study according to three dimensions: (i) environmental, (ii) technological, and (iii) linguistic, associating a pragmatic theory to the latter (GREENO, 1994; VAN LIER, 2000; LAMY & HAMPEL, 2007). The research findings showed that the environmental and technological affordances contributed to the construction of students’ presence as well as of a learning community. New forms of online interactions afforded new forms of language learning, especially by the movement of relexicalization and gap-filling.

The History and Philosophy of Ecological Psychology.

Ecological Psychology is an embodied, situated, and non-representational approach pioneered by J. J. Gibson and E. J. Gibson. This theory aims to offer a third way beyond cognitivism and behaviorism for understanding cognition. The theory started with the rejection of the premise of the poverty of the stimulus, the physicalist conception of the stimulus, and the passive character of the perceiver of mainstream theories of perception. On the contrary, the main principles of ecological psychology are the continuity of perception and action, the organism-environment system as unit of analysis, the study of affordances as the objects of perception, combined with an emphasis on perceptual learning and development. In this paper, first, we analyze the philosophical and psychological influences of ecological psychology: pragmatism, behaviorism, phenomenology, and Gestalt psychology. Second, we summarize the main concepts of the approach and their historical development following the academic biographies of the proponents. Finally, we highlight the most significant developments of this psychological tradition. We conclude that ecological psychology is one of the most innovative approaches in the psychological field, as it is reflected in its current influence in the contemporary embodied and situated cognitive sciences, where the notion of affordance and the work of E. J. Gibson and J. J. Gibson is considered as a historical antecedent.

Affordances in Psychology, Neuroscience, and Robotics: A Survey

The concept of affordances appeared in psychology during the late 60s as an alternative perspective on the visual perception of the environment. It was revolutionary in the intuition that the way living beings perceive the world is deeply influenced by the actions they are able to perform. Then, across the last 40 years, it has influenced many applied fields, e.g., design, human-computer interaction, computer vision, and robotics. In this paper, we offer a multidisciplinary perspective on the notion of affordances. We first discuss the main definitions and formalizations of the affordance theory, then we report the most significant evidence in psychology and neuroscience that support it, and finally we review the most relevant applications of this concept in robotics.

Is the body represented in everyday bodily activities?

There seem to be good reasons to think that there must be body representations or some kind of body content required for riding a bike or grabbing a cup of coffee. However, when I ride a bike or grab a cup of coffee, am I just representing the bike and the cup? Or am I actually also representing my body and bodily movements? The thesis of this paper is that the body not only figures in the content that guides everyday activities but that it must. How is this possible? Exactly what elements of the subject’s body can be said to figure in this content? I will proceed in three steps: in the first, I bring together the conceptual resources that seem to be required; in the second, I discuss a couple of proposals about how to link the notion of affordance and the topic of bodily representations, arguing that they are misguided; finally, I propose a view according to which the body’s physical and spatial properties are an unavoidable part of the content that guides everyday activities.

Speech affordances: A structural take on how much we can do with our words

AbstractIndividuals can do a broad variety of things with their words and enjoy different degrees of this capacity. What moderates this capacity? And in cases in which this capacity is unjustly disrupted, what is a good explanation for it? These are the questions I address here. I propose that speech capacity, understood as the capacity to do things with your words, is a structural property importantly dependent on individuals' position in a social structure. My account facilitates a non‐individualistic explanation of cases in which speech capacity is undermined due to speaker's perceived social identity, e.g. episodes of silencing. Instead of appealing to interlocutors' implicit bias against speaker's identity, a structural approach refers to the positions interlocutors occupy in the social structure and the discursive conventions operating upon those positions. I articulate my proposal drawing on the notion of affordances. Each position within a social structure is associated with its own range of speech affordances. Thus, speech capacity is a function of the probability distribution of speech affordances across positions in the structure.

Platform affordances and data practices: The value of dispute on Wikipedia

In this paper we introduce the device perspective as a methodological contribution to platform studies. Through an engagement with debates about the notion of affordances, which focus on the relation between the technical and the social, we put forward an approach to study the production of data within platforms by engaging with the material properties of platforms as well as their interpretation and deployment by various types of users. As a case in point, we study how the affordances of Wikipedia are deployed in the production of encyclopedic knowledge and how this can be used to study controversies. The analysis shows how Wikipedia affords unstable encyclopedic knowledge by having mechanisms in place that suggest the continuous (re)negotiation of existing knowledge. We furthermore showcase the use of our open-source software, Contropedia, which can be utilized to study knowledge production on Wikipedia.

Landscape and Health: Connecting Psychology, Aesthetics, and Philosophy through the Concept of Affordance.

In this paper we address a frontier topic in the humanities, namely how the cultural and natural construction that we call landscape affects well-being and health. Following an updated review of evidence-based literature in the fields of medicine, psychology, and architecture, we propose a new theoretical framework called “processual landscape,” which is able to explain both the health-landscape and the medical agency-structure binomial pairs. We provide a twofold analysis of landscape, from both the cultural and naturalist points of view: in order to take into account its relationship with health, the definition of landscape as a cultural product needs to be broadened through naturalization, grounding it in the scientific domain. Landscape cannot be distinguished from the ecological environment. For this reason, we naturalize the idea of landscape through the notion of affordance and Gibson’s ecological psychology. In doing so, we stress the role of agency in the theory of perception and the health-landscape relationship. Since it is the result of continuous and co-creational interaction between the cultural agent, the biological agent and the affordances offered to the landscape perceiver, the processual landscape is, in our opinion, the most comprehensive framework for explaining the health-landscape relationship. The consequences of our framework are not only theoretical, but ethical also: insofar as health is greatly affected by landscape, this construction represents something more than just part of our heritage or a place to be preserved for the aesthetic pleasure it provides. Rather, we can talk about the right to landscape as something intrinsically linked to the well-being of present and future generations.

Affordability of the Health Expenditures of Insured Americans Before the Affordable Care Act.

Central to the Affordable Care Act is the notion of affordability and the role of health insurance in making otherwise unaffordable health care affordable. We used data from the 1996 to 2008 versions of the Medical Expenditure Panel Survey to estimate the portion of overall health care expenditures by insured respondents that would otherwise have been beyond their disposable incomes and assets. We found that about one third of insured expenditures would have been unaffordable, with a much higher percentage among publicly insured individuals. This result suggests that one of the main functions of insurance is to cover expenses that insured individuals would not otherwise be able to afford.

A framework to evaluate the educational potential of a digital artefact for math learning

Abstract This article provides a methodology with two potential applications: to prove useful to maths teachers for analysing and evaluating the educational potential of different digital artefacts and to help designers of maths learning artefacts to evaluate their design during the implementation phase. The educational potential of an artefact is considered as an entity determined by actions and representations structure available within the artefact, the interpretation and behaviour of who uses it and the features of the activity in which it is used. The proposed methodology is based on the notions of affordance, narrative and cycle of expansive learning. The methodology has been applied on AlNuSet, a system designed for supporting the teaching and learning of algebra by means of modalities of interaction that are of visual, spatial and motor nature.