affordances/artifacts

Mike Cole (mcole who-is-at weber.ucsd.edu)
Thu, 28 Mar 1996 19:38:27 -0800 (PST)

My reading of Gibson's notion of affordance is that it is a relational,
systemic concept. In other words, an affordance is not just "in" an
environment; it is in the relation between some aspect of the environment
(seen as dynamic, not static) and an organism (e.g., the surface of a lake
does not afford walking to a human, but does to some kinds of insects).
For humans and other organisms that learn, affordances then are not simply
biological. And as activity theory points out, the "environment" is itself
massively transformed by human activity.

In this sense, it seems to me both true that mediational means transform
affordances and that they afford. In other words, the unit of analysis is
something more like a notion of functional systems as dynamic, fluid,
distributed, and situated constructions (I'm thinking here particularly of
Hutchin's use of functional systems in _Cognition in the Wild_). In this
sense then, you can't *really* separate out the activity setting from the
persons from the tools, although our language and our need to analyze
activity may encourage or require us to do so.

------
I recommend Ed Hutchin's book-- and the symposium about it
in MCA-- most highly for discussion of these issues. However,
its interesting the Ed does not mention Gibson and I do noit
recall him using the notion of affordances.
mike