My VIDI-research group at the University of Amsterdam works on a project named ‘The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind’.  But what are affordances exactly? Our new philosophical article (in collaboration with Julian Kiverstein) deals with this important question, amongst others. We just learned from the publisher that it features in the top-3 most downloaded articles published in Ecological Psychology in 2014. To celebrate this the publisher now offers free access to the paper, which is titled ‘A rich landscape of affordances‘.

In recent years, more and more researchers in cognitive science have embraced the notion that was originally introduced by J.J. Gibson. However, the notion of affordances is complex and unfortunately it often is used in ways that ignore its roots in Gibsonian ecological psychology (e.g. Reed, 1996 and Heft, 2001). In this conceptual article we take insights from that tradition seriously and integrate these with my own earlier philosophical work on situated normativity in Wittgenstein (Rietveld, 2008, Mind) to develop an improved definition of affordances. One that will inspire new research projects in philosophy, art and science.

Free access to article here: Rietveld, E. & Kiverstein, J. (2014). A rich landscape of affordances. Ecological Psychology 26 (4), pp. 325-352.

In a complementary paper we have argued that taking seriously the richness of the landscape of affordances has important implications for a neuroscience that recognizes the situatedness of the embodied mind. We also sketch its implications for Karl Friston’s work on the ‘anticipating brain’.

Update: These philosophical ideas on the landscape of affordances have inspired RAAAF and visual artist Barbara Visser to make an artwork titled ‘The End of Sitting: Outstanding Landscape of Affordances‘. This large spatial installation allows people to experience a novel landscape of standing affordances and move through it. It is the visual, or better artistic, complement to some of the ideas developed in our Ecological Psychology paper. One of the ambitions of the installation was to offer a large variety of standing affordances so that people would be solicited by multiple possibilities for working in different positions, ideally motivating them to switch postures every 30 minutes or so.

Updates 12/12/15: Our Ecological Psychology paper is now in their top 3 most read papers of all times online and RAAAF has been elected New Talent by New York’s Metropolis magazine for being at the forefront in the development of an architecture of affordances that could architects “create an architecture that is more human”. Harvard Design Magazine has published our article on the landscape of standing affordances we built.