Re: CHAT and Gibson

Joe Polman (polman who-is-at covis.nwu.edu)
Tue, 5 Mar 96 15:02:55 CST

Hi all,
Maybe a lot of the people on XMCA are already familiar with his work
(especially the ones at UCSD), but Don Norman really unpacked some
interesting and amusing examples of Gibson's affordances as they relate to
the design of artifacts and tools in his book _The Psychology of Everyday
Things_ (1988, New York: Basic Books).

I don't think Norman talks much about the relationship of the artifacts to
cultural historical activity, but a few other people have built on these
ideas. Roy Pea talked about this intersection some in his paper on
"distributed intelligence," as well as how artifacts take on certain
affordances both because of their physical characteristics *and* the
practices in which they are embedded.

Bringing practices into the picture points up a whole host of interesting
issues, such as the fact that some "affordances" of artifacts such as
Cartesian graphs or computer programs only become apparent once initiated
into the practices which make use of them well. Thus, the same
object-in-the-world can be a powerful tool for accomplishing activity for
one person and an opaque barrier to understanding activity to another
person. Not recognizing this can obviously cause problems in
teaching-learning situations or any collaborative activity.

I find it interesting to think of both artifacts and activities in
teaching-learning situations as both designed (at least in the sense of
having certain functional relations, and hopefully in the sense of being
based on sound choices) and ever-developing. I've been trying to build on
some of Pea's ideas to understand how a high school earth science teacher
"iteratively designs" a learning environment for and with his students in
which they conduct open-ended research projects.

Besides Norman, a number of other people in the "design" or human-computer
interaction realm talk about the relationship of designed artifacts to work
practices (e.g. Suchman), but I'm not sure how many of them are explicitly
concerned with Vygotsky or AT. Maybe some of the people who do
participatory design work like Penny Ehn have thought about this, but I'm
only secondarily familiar with their work

-Joe

(the Pea ref)
Pea, R. D. (1992). Practices of distributed intelligence and designs for
education. In G. Salomon (Ed.), Distributed cognitions (pp. 89-132). New
York: Cambridge University Press.