Affordances

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Comment by Roy Williams on March 18, 2011 at 13:17

Hi Steffen, ta.

Comment by Dr. Steffen Lepa on March 18, 2011 at 12:42

Hi Roy,

 

you got mail :-) And to answer the last open point: I am just following current discussions in philosophy of mind. I still dunno how to put that into praxis in my empirical work, but we will see...

Comment by Roy Williams on March 18, 2011 at 12:10

Hi Steffen, I dont have a copy of Gibson's 1979 text - if it is possible (and easy) please let me have a scanned copy of the relevant pages.

 

Where are you going with Socially Extended Mind?  Sounds fascinating. 

 

I need to focus on getting current software up and running first, but if and when that is done, I want to explore the affordances in the software for collaboration on many stories at the same time, particulalry using large touch tables, to once again emphasise the 'direct articulation' of tacit knowledge and association (to paraphrase Gibson). Links with ideas like this one.

 

You paper sounds fascinating.  I would love to find out more.  When you say 'habitual orientations' and higher order 'habitual orientations', what exactly are you describing? 

 

Our narratives were much more open ended, as we wanted to see what artefacts, if any, were relevant to their learning.  A fascinating case was a student who was desperately trying to 'read' the books on her first reading list, and the only way she could do so was by setting up a book on a stand in front of her ironing in the evening (the only quiet time she had).  She didnt succeed, as she was 'reading' from beginning to end (of each book) and not selecting sections for relevance first, so she had to completely re-learn how to 'read' in university mode. 

 

But the ironing / board had wonderful affordances, even if it was a really hard lesson to learn.

 

Further ...  much of what we analysed from the narratives was 'identity work' - in fact it dominated just about every story. So we ended up with a concept of identity as a 'repertoire of affordances', which might be similar to a 'repertoire of enactment potentials'. 

 

We also had to broaden out the traditional frame of the 'affordances of things' to affordances of acts (ironing), of 'indicative' objects (glass bottles in a preschool, which pointed to a radically different attitude to the preschool environment), and of spaces (the preschool itself).  This changes the 'resolution' or granularity of the unit of analysis completely from the focus on 'media tools' which was our starting point. 

 

I guess we ended up following the narrators own framework for sense-making, which is their own Gestalt (links back to what you said earlier).

 

Comment by Dr. Steffen Lepa on March 18, 2011 at 11:25

Hi Roy,

 

let me put forward two comments:

 

- Yes I know the Costall paper you are mentioning. And I also see that Gibson own position in his writings towards the problem of social negotiation with regard to the affordance concept is, to say the least, ambivalent :-)  Nevertheless, for me it was helpful to read the passage where he differentiated himself from Koffka to better understand his theoretical position - and I thought that might work for you too.. As I said - no intent in doing exegesis :-)
And let me add: I am also critical of some perverted forms of cognitivism and certainly interested in newer approaches to philosphy of mind (Enactive Cognition / Socially Extended Mind)

 

- your methodological approach sounds interesting and there is some familiarity with mine / ours. That leads me to the conference presentation that me and a colleague are preparing (i mentioned that before). We are conducting narrative biographical open interviews with people on their experience with certain media artifacts during lifespan. We then analyse this material with "documentary method" (developed by Ralf Bohnsack, meta-theoretically related to Bourdieu, Polanyi, Schuetz and Mannheim, and aiming at reconstructing Tacit Knowledge) to find out how certain habitual orientations may be enacted through with and by media use. In this theoretical frame, the artifacts' affordances would denote their respective "enactment potential" for a higher order habitual orientiation (e. g. identity work, bodily satisfaction, education, etc..). I am curious what you think of that approach..

Comment by Roy Williams on March 18, 2011 at 10:31

Hi Steffen, thanks for your response.  A few comments:

 

1. My own prejudices:

I feel most at home in 'ecological psycholgy'. I had my way, I suppose I would close down the Dept. of Cognitive Psycholgy, and the Dept. of Behaviour Psychology, and demand that they merge into a Dept of Ecological Psychology. I suspect that a hypothetical Gibson would be sympathetic!

 

2. I am sympathetic to Gibson's 'project' to explore 'direct perception', which is active, and to an impotant extent unmediated. In my own work, I am fascinated by Ramachandran's work (see BBC Reith lectures, 2004) on synaesthesia as a template for normal perception and learning, rather than a marginalised clinical condition.

 

But ... I go along with Costall's 1995 paper on socialising affordances, in which he says that Gibson seemed to have two theories of affordances, the second of which includes 'social interaction' (Gibson's phrase).

 

3. So ... to step back from Guru Exegesis for a moment ...

The way I operationalis affordances is by opening up the way people make sense of their learning and professional development, by asking them to tell me stories, and to apply 'enabling prompts' to elicit rich descriptions of what actually happens. These stories are mapped out in audio nodes, and the narrator then adds other associated multi-media texts.

 

What informs this practice is the idea that the substantially un-mediated, performative 'act' of story telling, and exploring and creating associated texts is uncluttered by the over-cognitive practices of 'reflective practice' that is dominating 'professional development portfolios'.

 

Which in turn means that I am most drawn to ecological psychology because of its critique of both 'representationalism' (I am a semiotician by training) and 'cognitivism'.  Which is not to say that, methodologically, I am averse to analysis and the application of critical theory. But it is to say that the richest primary data that I can get hold of is the data that is created in the performance of (prompted) story telling and pretty much 'free-association' iterative sense-making that follows.

 

The crux of the matter for me is that our narrators tell us that 'they didnt previously know' what they had just told us - i.e. the insights are what Knowledge Management would call 'deep tacit' knowledge.  Now that's an affordance that I a happy to spend a lot of effort facilitating, and trying to design human and software interactions to enable.  Work in progress.

 

There is a lengthy (draft) paper on affordances and the crtique of cognitivism here, if you are interested.

Comment by Dr. Steffen Lepa on March 17, 2011 at 13:01

Well Roy, I just read your paper and here's my main comment:

At first let me state that I am not very much into what I sometimes call "Pope Exegesis" (refering to people trying to interpret within their scientific papers how the grand old masters of some scientific discourse meant this or that term and who is right in his interpretation - I personly hate these kind of presentations). But the way your paper criticizes in points 2-3 the concept of affordance as it was explicitly  defined by Gibson makes me think that you want to stress something else than J. J. wanted. I think you are aiming at a concept that is more similar to what Gibson's teacher Koffka and also Kurt Lewin meant by "Aufforderungscharakter" (translated to "demand character" in english) and that is more social and relational and more "negotiated" by immediate action than Gibson's affordance concept, which itself is more refering to real physical properties of objects and less to actual goals, intentions and actions of actors. Gibson stresses this difference to Koffka's conception in his 1979 book somewhere (dunno the page right now).
Of course this is the central discussion point when it comes to "socializing affordances" (also in some Papers of Thomas A. Stoffregen, that I would recommend) and I may be wrong in my interpretation, but I would anyhow advice you to look up this part in Gibson's original work and see if and how your conception differs and how it relates to Koffka's. I mean, there is of course no problem in enhancement  of an old concept for new challenges, but there may be profound reasons why Gibson differentiated himself from Koffka and the struggle with that should may be part of your discussion.

No problems with the rest of the paper and the whole argumentation though - anyhow I would be interested in your ideas for operationalization of "affordances" in empirical work (which is linked to the socialization-problem)

 

Greetz,

 

Steffen

Comment by Roy Williams on March 14, 2011 at 11:24

Hi Steffan, I recently gave a paper on affordances which included much more on the issue of 'socializing affordances'.  I looked at a number of papers on affordances in media design, and realised that:

 

i) It doesnt actually make sense to go around calling everything an affordance.

ii) If so, we need to revisit the issue: In short, affordances are about change and adaptation, but that doesnt include what I much earlier called 'routine practices', which are stable, and probably shared with many others.

 

So I put together an initial sketch of the use/affordance relationship.

 

The paper is still in draft, but if you would like to have a copy (not for quotation) let me know at my email: roy.williams@port.ac.uk and I'll send you a copy.

I am very sympathetic to Bourdieu's Habitus, although I am no expert.  What we found in the affordances project (see chapter 4) is that learning is intimately linked with identity, identity can be seen as an (adapting) repertoire of afforances, and that affordances are continually pulled in different directions by different (and often competing and even incompatible) discourses. 

I have a sneaking feeling that Bourdieu deals with similar issues, but in a far more elegant fashion.  But maybe some food for thought there.

 

 

 

 

Comment by Dr. Steffen Lepa on March 11, 2011 at 12:10

Hi I am working on the Affordance concept in the Context of Media Research. Me and a colleague are at the moment trying to develop social-scientifc methods for reconstructing Media Gadgets' Affordances from narrative interviews with a methodology strongly relying on Bourdieus Habitus-Concept. From my point of view such a link could help with satisfyingly solving the problem of "socializing affordances".  So I would be interested in sources linking affordance theory and habitus, if there exist any. 

Thanx,

 

Steffen

Comment by Roy Williams on June 3, 2010 at 16:06

Sounds very interesting. Are there any links to Billett (or Unwin/ Fuller's work) that I can follow up?
The work we have done on affordances covers a number of case studies of work-place learners (http://learning-affordances.wikispaces.com/Project+Report) who have come back to education to do a degree. They engage with very different affordances in the Higher Education environment, and in the workplace, to carve out quite suprising affordances for themselves (in the case of 'April'), or heavily contest the way affordances are framed for them (in the case of 'Mike'). But in both cases there is a large discrepancy between what the university thinks is an affordance for them, and what they regard as an affordance (or dis-fordance). I am trying to get a paper together on some of these issues, titled "The paradox of becoming a 'graduate-professional'" - the issue is simply that the two different requirements (academic and professional) rarely sit together comfortably.

Comment by Dr Rachel Shanks on June 1, 2010 at 13:22

Stephen Billett has written on workplace learning. He is in Australia. His approach has been to look at how much workplaces offer affordances for workers to learn and then whether workers choose to take up those affordances. I have found Lorna Unwin and Alison Fuller's work on expansive learnng environements to have many similarities.

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