>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.
I wasn't suggesting that Hutchins talks about affordances, pointing more to
his unit of analysis, functional systems. But yes, it is interesting that
he does not talk about "affordances". He clearly suggests that he sees
part of the structure that is propagated in the navigational fix cycle as
"in the world".
For example, on pp. 172-173, he notes that stars are natural, not
artifacts, but that they have structure and their distribution in the sky
(more or less random sprinkling, rather than uniform) makes navigation by
the stars possible. In talking about functional systems, he later cites
Bateson's example of the blind man walking with a stick, where again part
of the information is in the structure of the city. So does anyone have a
sense of why he does not mention Gibson and affordances?
Paul Prior
p-prior who-is-at uiuc.edu
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign