What is an affordance and can it help us understand the use of ICT in education?

This paper revisits the concept of affordance and explores its contribution to an understanding of the use of ICT for teaching and learning. It looks at Gibson‟s original idea of affordance and at some of the difficulties long associated with the use of the word. It goes on to describe the translation of the concept of affordance into the field of design through the work, in particular, of Norman. The concept has since been translated into research concerning ICT and further opportunities and difficulties emerge. The paper locates key points of divergence within the usage of „affordance‟, as involving direct perception, invariant properties and complementarity. It concludes by arguing that affordance offers a distinctive perspective on the use of ICT in education because of its focus on possibilities for action

Rethinking affordance

n/a – Critical survey essay retheorising the concept of 'affordance' in digital media context. Lead article in a special issue on the topic, co-edited by the authors for the journal Media Theory

Learning to Act Properly: Predicting and Explaining Affordances from Images

We address the problem of affordance reasoning in diverse scenes that appear in the real world. Affordances relate the agent's actions to their effects when taken on the surrounding objects. In our work, we take the egocentric view of the scene, and aim to reason about action-object affordances that respect both the physical world as well as the social norms imposed by the society. We also aim to teach artificial agents why some actions should not be taken in certain situations, and what would likely happen if these actions would be taken. We collect a new dataset that builds upon ADE20k, referred to as ADE-Affordance, which contains annotations enabling such rich visual reasoning. We propose a model that exploits Graph Neural Networks to propagate contextual information from the scene in order to perform detailed affordance reasoning about each object. Our model is showcased through various ablation studies, pointing to successes and challenges in this complex task

Socially extending the mind through social affordances

The extended mind thesis claims that at least some cognitive processes extend beyond the organism’s brain in that they are constituted by the organism’s actions on its surrounding environment. A more radical move would be to claim that social actions performed by the organism could at least constitute some of its mental processes. This can be called the socially extended mind thesis. Based on the notion of affordance as developed in the ecological psychology tradition, I defend the position that perception extends to the environment. Then I will expand the notion of affordance to encompass social affordances. Thus, perception can in some situations also be socially extended