Affordances and Culture
From special issue of Ecological Psychology 15.2 (2003): “How Shall Affordances Be Refined? Four Perspectives” [pdf on laptop]
Essay by Harry Heft, “Affordances, Dynamic Experience, and the Challenge of Reification” (pp. 149-80) (this essay takes a phenomenological approach to affordances, with many references to William James)
“Affordances are multidimensional.” (p. 157)
“... with affordances we do enter indeed the world of ‘oughts’ — that is, the world of values.” (p. 157)
“If we take the long view offered by a socio-cultural perspective, and recognize that the environments in which we live are mostly constructed and sustained through human activities, affordances can be seen as embedded in ongoing collective social activities. The products of collective processes over time constitute the context for subsequent human actions, and so on in a continuous manner. In this way, some of the affordance possibilities that exist at any particular time reflect earlier sociohistorical actions and choices, and they serve as a platform for future endeavors.” (p. 177)
unintended affordances; opportunities for novelty; “a margin of open-endedness in prospective change.” (p. 176)
“The affordances that are available to be perceived by an individual over time reflect an interweaving of reciprocal, continuing, historical processes. Perception-action systems are facets of ongoing intentional actions embedded in learning and developmental processes; and, as a result, affordance possibilities are delimited relative to the perceiver’s history. Concurrently, the affordances that are available to be perceived are features of a world that is in the process of continuous change, with most of these changes being the products of human actions. In the midst of these ever-weaving strands, some affordances come into existence in time, others are preserved or transformed, and still others fade at the prospective edge of immediate experience.” (p. 177)
Commenting is closed for this article.