Affordances and the Potential for Architecture

Affordances and the Potential for Architecture divulges our engagement with the built environment is a deeply rooted experience. In a biological and philosophical sense, it reveals that the mind is inseparable from the body, just as the body is inseparable from its environment. The world displays itself before us as rife with potential movements, activities, engagements, for which we continuously rehearse the myriad possibilities and choose the best course of action in the moment. It defines our phenomenological natures through this readiness-for-action, and thereby suggests we will improve the spaces, buildings, and landscapes that we inhabit by mastering how we enact and perceive them. This concise manuscript proposes affordances as an important contribution to thinking about architecture, space, and perception. To be sure, Architecture is not an object but something we do. The argument opens with Andrea Jelić’s pervasive question, “How does architecture afford being-in-the-world?” Identifying humans’ modern conceit of separating the mind from the body and the body from its situation—she frames our scaffold for experience alternately as one of co-dependence rather than of abstraction. Our perception nests and centers the sensory body in the unfolding discoveries of science’s new models of cognition, along the ecological thesis of James Gibson’s affordances. Likewise, Sarah Robinson, in “Articulating Affordances: Towards a New Theory of Design,” demonstrates that one size never fits all. Even as our bodies are equally constituted and share much in common, it is the specificity of differences between us that should instruct designers. There is no “average” body size for women nor a standard size of fighter pilot. Instead, there is a double entendre which asks desingers to understand perception as the confluence of varying influences, all the while considering the particularities of an individual. In architecture, a theory of affordances appreciates that while the rocking chair will always provide for rocking, its occupation depends on location and the frame of mind of the person so absorbed. Such sensory partaking in life, like rocking in a chair, is the material beauty of an architectural moment. It is the rocking chair which animates the porch. In “Just What Can Architects Afford?” Harry Mallgrave claims that after decades of architects reducing form to conceptual gamesmanship, one has to raise the question of where has this left architectural practice? Has it improved our cities or our houses? In the face of the mounting evidence to the contrary, and in view of the complexity of information age real life, wants, and desires, shall architects mindlessly follow the old Modernist track? The new biological models reveal that our engagement with buildings is “a whole-body experience,” one grounded not only in our multisensory, emotional, and visceral responses to the world but also in the phenomenal or “lived” nature of our being. Standing against the hollowing of human nature in contemporary digital practice, Mallgrave offers the lesson that we are indeed active agents in the culture that we create, and this built world can indeed be attuned to our biological and social natures. Beauty is something we do, an expression of the vital paradisiacal instinct grounded in human nature. James Hamilton, to wit asks, “How do Appreciators and Designers Discover Affordances?” He assigns to himself the difficult task of arbitrating for the ‘user,’ who might appreciate a building, while at the same time distrusting the designer to grasp the real intention of the things they make. He does so by examining Gibson’s claims for affordances and questioning the basis for understanding how objects appear to us or are useful within a specific environment. It seems that what something affords has to do with the experience or understanding you bring to the artifact and moment. You have to see a chair as a chair in order to sit upon it. A secondary and more difficult notion here is that even if a designer makes a chair, it may still be at odds with the peculiarities of the individual. As Dr. Hamilton concludes, “There is no shortcut to understanding on the part of appreciators, and none on the part of designers who design things for them.” Architects say they must educate their clients, yet in order to make this strategy work, designers must be better educated in the needs, wants, and desires of their clients. Affordances are a way to understand the environmental actions and behaviors of our species, while recognizing that which makes us humans of individual needs. One size never fits all, although it begins in our mutual humanity and dependable biology. Taken in sum, these essays consider the model of affordances within the context of architecture and provide a valuable contribution to this discussion of how to conceive, think, and better attune the human organism with the environment in which we dwell.https://newprairiepress.org/ebooks/1036/thumbnail.jp

Developing a conformance methodology for clinically-defined medical record headings:a preliminary report.

Background: The Professional Records Standards Body for health and social care (PRSB) was formed in 2013 to develop and assure professional standards for the content and structure of patient records across all care disciplines in the UK. Although the PRSB work is aimed at Electronic Health Record (EHR) adoption and interoperability to support continuity of care, the current technical guidance is limited and ambiguous. Objectives: This project was initiated as a proof-ofconcept to demonstrate whether, and if so, how, conformance methods can be developed based on the professional standards. Methods: An expert group was convened, comprising clinical and technical representatives. A constrained data set was defined for an outpatient letter, using the subset of outpatient headings that are also present in the ep-SOS patient summary. A mind map was produced for the main sections and sub-sections. An openEHR archetype model was produced as the basis for creating HL7 and IHE implementation artefacts. Results: Several issues about data definition and representation were identified when attempting to map the outpatient headings to the epSOS patient summary, partly due to the difference between process and static viewpoints. Mind maps have been a simple and helpful way to visualize the logical information model and expose and resolve disagreements about which headings are purely for human navigation and which, if any, have intrinsic meaning. Conclusions: Conformance testing is feasible but nontrivial. In contrast to traditional standards-development timescales, PRSB needs an agile standards development process with EHR vendor and integrator collaboration to ensure implementability and widespread adoption. This will require significant clinical and technical resources

On (Some) Explanations in Physics

I offer one possible explanation of why inertial and gravitational mass are equal in Newtonian gravitation. I then argue that this is an example of a kind of explanation that is not captured by standard philosophical accounts of scientific explanation. Moreover, this form of explanation is particularly important, at least in physics, because demands for this kind of explanation are used to motivate and shape research into the next generation of physical theories. I suggest that explanations of the sort I describe reveal something important about one way in which physical theories can be related diachronically.Comment: 32 pages. Forthcoming in Philosophy of Scienc

Human-centered Electric Prosthetic (HELP) Hand

Through a partnership with Indian non-profit Bhagwan Mahaveer Viklang Sahayata Samiti, we designed a functional, robust, and and low cost electrically powered prosthetic hand that communicates with unilateral, transradial, urban Indian amputees through a biointerface. The device uses compliant tendon actuation, a small linear servo, and a wearable garment outfitted with flex sensors to produce a device that, once placed inside a prosthetic glove, is anthropomorphic in both look and feel. The prosthesis was developed such that future groups can design for manufacturing and distribution in India

Pictures in Your Mind: Using Interactive Gesture-Controlled Reliefs to Explore Art

Tactile reliefs offer many benefits over the more classic raised line drawings or tactile diagrams, as depth, 3D shape, and surface textures are directly perceivable. Although often created for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people, a wider range of people may benefit from such multimodal material. However, some reliefs are still difficult to understand without proper guidance or accompanying verbal descriptions, hindering autonomous exploration. In this work, we present a gesture-controlled interactive audio guide (IAG) based on recent low-cost depth cameras that can be operated directly with the hands on relief surfaces during tactile exploration. The interactively explorable, location-dependent verbal and captioned descriptions promise rapid tactile accessibility to 2.5D spatial information in a home or education setting, to online resources, or as a kiosk installation at public places. We present a working prototype, discuss design decisions, and present the results of two evaluation studies: the first with 13 BVI test users and the second follow-up study with 14 test users across a wide range of people with differences and difficulties associated with perception, memory, cognition, and communication. The participant-led research method of this latter study prompted new, significant and innovative developments

The *subjectivity* of subjective experience - A representationalist analysis of the first-person perspective

This is a brief and accessible English summary of the "Self-model Theory of Subjectivity" (SMT), which is only available as German book in this archive. It introduces two new theoretical entities, the "phenomenal self-model" (PSM) and the "phenomenal model of the intentionality-relation" PMIR. A representationalist analysis of the phenomenal first-person persepctive is offered. This is a revised version, including two pictures

Theorising disability: a practical and representative ontology of learning disability

This article contributes to the ongoing development of the theorisation of learning disability, focusing on the value of the ontological turn. We argue that while social theory has influenced understandings of disability within academia, particularly within disability studies, it has had a limited impact on the discursive and practical use of the term ‘learning disability’. How ‘learning disability’ is constructed is of direct consequence to the lives of people with learning disabilities. Owing to this, we present a practical and representative ontology of learning disability in order to progress the ontological turn into everyday understandings of disability. To do this, disability theory is discussed, critically appraised and progressed. We then outline how this new theorisation could be re-contextualised within policy, with a view to further re-contextualisation into practice and the everyday. It is hoped that this article will spark discussion regarding how the ontological turn can be used for change

How to Knit Your Own Markov Blanket

Hohwy (Hohwy 2016, Hohwy 2017) argues there is a tension between the free energy principle and leading depictions of mind as embodied, enactive, and extended (so-called ‘EEE1 cognition’). The tension is traced to the importance, in free energy formulations, of a conception of mind and agency that depends upon the presence of a ‘Markov blanket’ demarcating the agent from the surrounding world. In what follows I show that the Markov blanket considerations do not, in fact, lead to the kinds of tension that Hohwy depicts. On the contrary, they actively favour the EEE story. This is because the Markov property, as exemplified in biological agents, picks out neither a unique nor a stationary boundary. It is this multiplicity and mutability– rather than the absence of agent-environment boundaries as such - that EEE cognition celebrates