Welcome to Emerging Futures -- Vol 90! Coasting into Affordances...
Good morning beings of a tilted planet,
Unofficial summer has begun! The almost full moon is high in the sky by sunset and gone by dawn – a perfect time for long days in the mountains.
The vegetable garden is growing happily, and the many spontaneously growing plants – the weedy and wiley creatures of the urban plant world – are going more often into the salad bowl. And the bees on top of the garage are waggling, dancing, and buzzing their way across everything in bloom.
Walking, hiking, beaching, camping, and kayaking are all coming to the forefront of our thoughts and activities – the car is being packed as this is reaching your inbox for a weekend kayaking and camping on some small islands.
Over the last several weeks, we have been introducing an alternative way to approach human creative practices that lets us understand how our creativity is not all about ourselves. It is an approach that also helps us put aside two highly prevalent approaches to creativity: the god model and the problem-solution approach.
Last week we took a critical look at the implicit model of the self that underpins these two models, and that has dominated the conceptualization of the self, cognition, and how we are in the world over the last seventy-five years:
It is ultimately a computational model that imagines something “out there” comes into our brain via sense organs as “sense data,” and our brains operating analogously to a computer process this raw data and turn it into internal representations, which it then acts upon – all the while getting more sense data inputs…
And because of this logic’s basic model of the human as a static solitary individual just standing erect surveying the world, we have been fondly referring to this as the “the camerabrain-on-a-stick” approach to perception and cognition.
It is an approach that strongly divides the “inside” from the “outside”. It is what Alfred North Whitehead aptly called “the bifurcation of nature” – where “out there” is a bare reality of mere stuff in motion, while “in here” – inside of us – really in our brains are all the other qualities of color, smell, taste, warmth, sound, feeling, meaning, value and identity. It is a bleak vision of a profound alienation – where nothing that ultimately matters is outside of us – and everything is ultimately subjective and internal.
This alienating divide is central to the camerabrain-on-a-stick approach – and in all varieties of models – ranging from ones that are realist to ones that are idealist – essentially, we could all be in the Matrix.
Many of us intuit that this is not how things are at an experiential level – things are far more dynamic, intra-active, looping, and relational. And there are numerous powerful critiques of this “bifurcation of nature” and everything it entails – from the Enactive Approach to Cognition or Environmental Psychology. Some of which we dug into over the last couple of weeks, and all of which profoundly shape our approach to creativity and innovation. But overcoming the pervasive hold this camerabrain approach has upon us is no easy task – almost all critiques slip back into this deeply flawed approach one unconscious step by one unconscious step.
Let's take a moment to highlight one of these approaches:
As a corrective to the classical realist account of cognition (brain processes sense data brought in via sense organs and turn it into representations of a fully separated external world), a more dynamic realist approach has developed.
This approach acknowledges how many things such as one's body, the environment, culture, tools, etc., influence cognition. But the way this is framed is in a linear quantification manner: “Yes, your body is necessary for, and influences, cognition – but it plays a minor role.”
What all such approaches fail to recognize is that these interactions are non-linear, relational, and emergent:
This quality is what we are going to explore in the second half of this newsletter.
A second challenge that we also pointed out last week is that it can often seem like there is an infinitely long laundry list of concepts that some belligerent god demands we learn before we can understand, use or even speak about a dynamic approach to reality:
Last week, in regard to this, we made the analogy: the task of mastering this infinite list is like:
“Learning to ride a bike by separately learning first how to pedal independently of anything else, then how to squeeze the brakes, then how to turn the handlebars, then how to sit on the seat. No matter how good we get at each of these distinct practices – we will not be able to ride a bike.“
But, learning to ride a bike involves something quite different – we start by immersing ourselves holistically in a simplified version of the core qualitative experience of riding a bike – basically just coasting on the bike. Once we can do this – we are on our way to riding a bike – and all the other skills (steering, braking, sitting, etc.) organically fall into place.
Then last week, we left you with a cliffhanger of a question:
“What would the similar experience be like for an alternative to trying to master an infinite corrective list or falling back into being a pragmatically patched up version of the camera-on-a-stick?”
And this week we can answer this question right off the bat:
“AFFORDANCES!”
Yep! For us, getting a grip on affordances has been a similar experience to finding “moving-balance” on a bike in regards to overcoming the bifurcation of nature and the camerabrain-on-a-stick approach to reality.
And likewise, for us, after gaining a good sense of “affordances,” – all the other concepts (enaction, emergence, assemblage, exaptation, etc.) “organically” fall into place. Well, maybe not fully organically, but you get the concept.
Just to be clear – we don’t think that affordance is THE most important concept ever, or that this is the concept that subsumes all others. Still, as we have helped others come to grips with this concept, we have found that many other concepts spontaneously emerge and fall into place after grasping affordances. We find that a lived experience of affordances gives one a genuine feeling for a real actionable alternative to the camerabrain and genuinely new ways to engage with creative processes. We have also found that starting with other concepts, such as complexity and complex adaptive systems, does not lead to such an outcome for us and most often leaves the whole camerabrain model firmly as ever implicitly in place.
Now, we have already introduced this concept of affordances in the last couple of newsletters as part of how we move out of the problem-solution approach to creativity. In this newsletter, we want to expand that context, make it clear what it is not, and most importantly, experientially ground how radical this approach is in everyday experience.
It is also true that you can find the concept of affordances being used in many major approaches to creativity – especially in the product design world.
But, we find that it far too often gets subsumed into merely augmenting the camerabrain-on-a-stick model. This is especially true of many design-based approaches that simply equate affordances with features of the environment.
Let’s just make this really clear: Affordances are NOT environmental features. Why this is – is what we are going to get to:
Let's get started experientially engaging with affordances by saying that anything actually remotely, like the camerabrain experience of disembodied static viewing, is an exceedingly rare one – we are always in the midst of activity at many scales. We are always underway doing things. Our head moves as our hands reach out, and our torso leans in to aid in looking closer. Our core subtly tightens as we pick the thing up. We emotionally sense others who are working alongside us.
We are always in action doing something in continuous embodied negotiation with our surroundings.
Pay attention to your body as you read this: notice the embodied adapting, adjusting, moving, doing – there is nothing static or passive – there is no mere inputting of data – something far more dynamic, active, and creative is happening at many scales at once.
So the generic picture needs to change already:
It is not just a solitary individual standing erect, surveying a static scene and mulling it over in their heads:
We are with others and shaped by others (even when we are alone). These others are not just people but carpets, floors, stairs, grass, tools (such as language), concepts, large-scale social forces, habits, and practices – in short, a way of life.
We are born with embodied abilities that have co-evolved with and through activities.
We are born into an ongoing way of life and environmental shaping that also co-evolved with and through activities. The mediation of this assemblage of embodied abilities in a way of life in relation to dense, nested co-shaped socio-material environment has a generative force – it provides the conditions for the emergence of our agency in and of an affordance landscape.
It is a landscape that solicits us towards actions & the activities of perceiving things as things.
Our sense of self, our perceptions, our embodiment, our actions & our environment – are thus not ours alone. The self is an active relational being that is irreducible to the concept of some self-sufficient essence. The creative processes we participate in are always worldly – they have made us – even as we participate in making them.
We need to look above, below & beside our seemingly self-sufficient “selves.”
Astonishingly, when we look around ourselves, we see things as “things”. This can sound odd – what does it mean that we see things as things? When we look around, we are not confronted by vague patterns of colors flooding in through our eyes that we then bring together in our brains as representations with great effort.
Why do we see things as things?
Look up from this screen, and look around you – what do you immediately perceive? Things! A table, a chair, the room, windows, a pen – every thing that you see – you see directly as what they are to you – not vague sensations of colors pressing against the eye for the brain to sort out later.
But don’t take our word for it…
Take a moment to try these exercises for yourself - so you can experience what we are describing as perception… even if you get where we are going with this – perhaps especially if you get where we are going!
It is important to feel how perceiving is a very particular kind of activity. And how the things perceived are very particular kinds of things that are far, far removed from mere stuff in motion or naked sense data.
Let's start by actively feeling how perception is an embodied and physically grounded activity:
Start by just moving around the space you are in. As you get comfortable moving, stop looking at things and just keep moving. Don’t try to go fast, slow is better. Feel free to use your hands. Now stand up on things – a chair, a sofa. Notice how your body adjusts – finds a dynamic relation to the environment. Play with this for a bit.
Pick things up. Reach out and grasp something with your hands. Do this a few times with both hands. Try not to look directly at what you pick up. Notice how effectively your hand comes to grasp, how independent it is, and how it micro-adjusts and orients the thing it is holding.
How does having hands shape and (in)form your perception of things?
Why do we say things like, “I can’t quite grasp what you are saying?” “Get a grip!”, “Hold onto that thought,” “Get in touch…” (There are a number of beautiful books on the hand, a favorite is “The Hand: How Its Use Shapes the Brain, Language, and Human Culture” by Frank Wilson).
Now, get up and go and pour yourself a glass of water. Pay attention to the whole of your body and how it uses the environment. What are the subtle cues your body is getting? Notice how little direct viewing you are doing. You can open a cupboard and get out a glass without much of a glance. Ice from the freezer, pivoting in a continuous motion to the sink. Notice how your body and your environment fit each other – work with each other. Take your time to do a few mundane activities slowly. Pay attention to how involved your body and the environment are in your perceiving.
Now that I am sitting down again at my writing table, I, for example, just noticed how much my hands brush ever so gently and glancingly against things at the very last moment before I grasp what I am reaching for – in this case, my glass of water. The edge of the bottom of my palm just brushes the table surface as my hand grasps the glass. Then as I put the glass down, the same edge of the bottom of my palm touches the table momentarily before the glass.
It is important to sense for yourself how many senses and parts of your body – and parts of the environment – are active in your perceptual action. Seeing is astonishingly immersive and encompassing.
Think of a lifetime of these processes: muscles, skin, and bone developing to fully participate. Actions and reactions developing. Continuous changes to the environment and tools happening. Think about the enormous, if mundane, efforts you have undertaken to shape your environment.
Think also of how this is all part of a specific way of life. Your hands reach out for things that recognize them as part of a way of living – it “knows” cupness in its grip.
We are of a space and of embodied habits. But it is something we only really notice when, as Heidegger pointed out, something breaks or changes. Your phone screen dies. Now that it has vanished, you see how it wove a world – a way of life seamlessly into being. Or a hole develops in your rock climbing shoes mid-climb – where previously a seamless world propelled and activated your movements – now the rock face becomes other than you, and your world shrinks to your body, toes slipping…
An easy way to sense how deep your fit and intra-dependency is, try working on the floor for a few hours. Work on your laptop on the floor. For most of us, our bodies will twist and turn, unable to locate themselves or support themselves – where do your legs go? Straight, crossed, kneeling? Then notice how happily your body joins back to your furniture…
Now having done these exercises and thought experiments let's come back to the question: what are you perceiving?
First, notice how in the above descriptions and exercises to talk of “perceiving” was ultimately to talk about “what are you doing?” – and more than that, it was an inquiry into “what are you doing because of the specific historical skilled body you have in this particular historical environment?”
Perception was not camera-like. Nor did it involve the production of and interpretation of derived representations. Perception was direct and active.
Our perceiving activities were all about and in relation to the interaction of specific embodied abilities and some relevant aspects of the environment. Lets now build upon this:
Think of another more complex context: cooking a meal:
As you gain skills as a cook, your embodied abilities develop in a close feedback loop with countless specific aspects of the environment:
And so, if we look at any one of these relations, we will see that they are a dynamic relation between some evolving embodied ability and some socio-material environmental aspect. Through interactions, new affordances emerge – our abilities are developing hand in glove with how the environment responds – affordances “solicit” and beckon us on – an errant shake of the pan leads to something in the pan flipping… this solicit further creative action – skills develop and eventually pans take on new shapes as designers respond.
So what of perception? Perception builds upon this more basic affordance relation. What we perceive – what we always all the time at every moment perceive is the relation between those abilities and the relevant aspect of the environment:
Perception is a relation to a relation.
Now, a useful way to understand the active and relational nature of perception and what is perceived is by giving it a different, more accurate name. What we perceive are not “things in themselves” (as objective Realism would suggest), nor are they things our brain independently constructs (as Idealism would suggest) but “affordances.” What we perceive is what is “afforded” to us by the relation between our embodied abilities and relevant aspects of the environment.
But we need to remember the active and deeply enmeshed nature of perception that we felt and experienced in our exercises.
To say “perception” is to invoke an ongoing activity. Thus, what is meant by “affordance” is in no way a static image of perception – that would take us backward and bring us one step closer to returning to the disembodied-camerabrain-on-a-stick. How is it active?
Affordances – what we always and at all times perceive are possibilities for action provided by the relation between abilities and aspects of the environment as part of an ongoing set of activities:
These are open, dynamic, and created in action.
The things we perceive – what we call the table, the chair, books, and carpets – these are all perceived as possibilities for action (within a way of life).
How did something become a possibility? By the inter-subjective social creating of a relation. And this creation must be understood as a creative act – really a co-creative act.
Perceiving is a co-creative act that rests upon the co-creative acts of affordance production:
It is, in fact, an ongoing and unending co-creative action. To get to a perception, we have to nurture a creative relation between abilities and aspects of the environment. It is a creative act that we are always part of, and that is always underway. And it is this relation that creates new abilities, and these, in turn, create changes in the aspects of the environment.
There isn’t any neutral pre-given “stuff” out there to just be “seen,” as the camerabrain model would suggest. Nor, as many would suggest, are affordances just useful aspects of the external environment. They are co-created achievements – a form of “original” and ongoing more-than, but very human creativity. Your being alive is a co-creative dance of an animal-environment moving itself into being. Thus we can say “you” are creative – but it is not about you – or just because of you – it is moving through you, beside you, above you, and below you.
They, and us, are a creativity of the middle:
James Gibson, who coined the term and first developed the concept of an affordance, put it this way: “An affordance is neither an objective property nor is it a subjective property; or it is both if you like. An affordance cuts across the dichotomy of subjective-objective and helps us understand its inadequacy. It is equally a fact of the environment and a fact of behavior. It is both physical and psychical, yet neither. An affordance points both ways, to the environment and to the observer.”
What is creative is the dynamic co-creating system that gives rise to a meaningful world. It is a co-creative practice of niche or specific environment construction – think of your kitchen, and remember cooking in other kitchens... It is the creative making of experience – a logic of experience that arises and stays in the middle.
“Experience is not something that happens to us. It is something we do: it is a temporally extended process of skillful probing. The world makes itself available to our reach. The experience comprises mind and world. Experience has content only thanks to the established dynamics of interaction between perceiver and world” (A. Noe, Italics added).
Thus the first question to ask about an affordance is: what specific environment/activity is it part of?
Here part of creativity becomes a critical experimental attunement to an environment/niche/taskspace – playing and probing affordances. (We wrote about this in-depth, going further with the cooking example in newsletter #12).
When we speak of human experience and human creativity it is not something we have or conjure as a special internal brain property – as a special addition to our basic way of being alive – creativity is always already a quality of our reality and existence.
“The world has some structure, but it is not fully pre-formed. The world needs to be met halfway. “ says John Protevi in a beautiful passage on affordances.
The world is dynamic – and we are in a continuously dynamic co-creative situation of meaningful collaborative adjustment with any of it – experimental probing and creative attunement. We are co-creating sense (affordances/meaning) in co-creative sensing (perception).
Protevi goes on to say that we need a way to understand “the way the world reveals itself in the middle between subject and thing; it is not introspection into the picture-creating activity of an idealist subject, nor is it introspection into the camera-like abilities of a realist and representing subject.” And this is where we come to the co-creative logic that an understanding affordances brings us into:
There is a concrete perceptual process in which creativity works the middle: the co-shaped socially embedded embodied perceiver creatively integrates changing dynamics of movement and sensation – and does so in relation to an active socio-material environment to individuate this collaboratively into meaningful perceptual objects.
If we now come back to the promise of our bike analogy, now that we have a grip on affordances – how can we sense how other concepts flow out from this?
Affordances “are the relation between aspects of the (sociomaterial) environment and abilities available in a form of life, in a practice.” (Rietveld, Denys, & van Westen). What is so wonderful with this extended definition is that when we grasp it – many critically related terms also “fall into place” – and really make sense:
One could try to begin to develop a new approach to creativity by mastering each of these concepts one by one. But when we begin by experimentally engaging with affordances and gain a good grasp on this concept we pull in all of these other concepts in a very organic manner. And because of this, for us, Affordances becomes a critical initial concept to engage with to develop a robust alternative approach to creativity.
Well, we hope this particular dive into affordances helps you shift into a new creative approach and posture. Next week we will radiate out from affordances into this surrounding terrain, till then, have a wondrously co-creative week!
Till Volume 91,
Jason and Iain
Emergent Futures Lab
We’re How You Innovate
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