Re: affordances/functional systems/Ed H

pprior who-is-at ux1.cso.uiuc.edu
Sun, 31 Mar 1996 23:37:52 -0600

Mike, thanks for the "3cent history". It helps to have this kind of sense
of the contexts of _Cognition in the Wild_. I had just started trying to
work out where Hutchins' notion of functional systems was coming from and
how it related to your discussions in the Construction Zone and to Luria
1932, which I just picked up last week and haven't read yet.

>There are not many references in Ed's book. Over a period of years here
>in the "pre-cog sci" days when the Center For Human Information Processing
>was the leading venue for such discussions, the CHIP folks beat heavily
>on Gibsonian ideas. But over time, in part because of the influence of
>Ed and perhaps of me, Don Norman started to take a more congenial view
>toward artifact mediation. Gerry Balzano, who has worked on event perception,
>was also a participant in these discussions.
>
>A little later, Ed bumped into the functional systems ideas in conjunction
>with AR Luria's writings, and perhaps Anokhin/Leontiev, perhaps in
>discussions with Yrjo Engestrom.

Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign