Connections
At my second-hand bookstore, I
recently bought a book called The Powerof Place by Winifred Gallagher about the emotional and behavioral effects of environment on human
beings, discussing such topics as the differences between living in cold and
warm climates, effects of indoor climate, effects of geomagnetic field,
environmental stimulation and so on. Although I haven’t read the book yet, it
seems to have a strong connection to these three readings. Places and objects offer us affordances. By serving as tools or as mediators of
sensory experiences, our surroundings become extensions of our selves.
Bateson’s essay “Form, Substance
and Difference” argues that human beings are like nodes in a large
infrastructure, a larger network. Not
only that, but connections reaching from our inner selves, our nervous systems,
reach out past our corporeal boundaries to connect us to the world in an
ecological relationship that he describes as mind. Thus, in a sense our minds are part of a
larger, universal, interconnected mind.
If this is true, then it matters deeply how we treat our environment
because in a very real sense destroying one’s environment means destroying
oneself. (See p. 457.)
Gibson’s (1986) discussion of
affordances has been widely referenced. Even
though the concept was somewhat familiar, it was helpful to go back to Gibson’s
introduction of the concept. Affordances
“are in a sense objective, real, and physical,” as Gibson notes (p. 129). That is, we think of affordances as objects
or as spaces with physical qualities, but the idea of an affordance requires an
organism to interact and it is the complimentary nature of the organism and the
qualities of the objects or spaces that make affordances, affordances. As Gibson points out, “an affordance cuts
across the dichotomy of subjective-objective… 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” (p. 129). In a sense, then, the theory
of affordances is compatible with Bateson’s ideas since it provides a
conceptual bridge between the environment and the organisms. If we are to call the human being a node,
perhaps an affordance serves as a connection in the ecological framework.
Norman’s brief essay on “Affordances
and Design” builds on this concept. For example,
Norman points out that “to Gibson, affordances are a relationship”. One point that Norman is trying to make here
is that we need to distinguish between affordances that are perceived—the usual
way that the term is, in fact, used—and the complete class of affordances, an
open class that is never completely defined by users. In fact, for the designer, it is the
perceived affordances that are crucial.
It is more important that users are drawn to clickable spaces, for example,
than it is to recognize that one could stroke part of the screen. As I think about it, perhaps there is something
of a continuum here, though. When I
think about my iPhone screen, I enjoy stroking the screen of the phone when it
is not activated. The surface is smooth
and a pleasing, glossy black. It is
quite probable that the designers are not blind to the pleasing aspects of the
iPhone as an aesthetic object beyond its more obvious functions. The best products are pleasing on many
levels. However, this goes beyond Norman’s
useful insight about perceived affordances and design.
Wait! Haven't I heard that before?
As I was reading Bateson’s
discussion of “difference,” I couldn’t help thinking that his ideas sounded
just a little bit Derrida’s notion of difference (différance). I understand that Derrida’s French pun adds another
element, but there did seem to be some similarities, so I wondered if other
scholars had picked up on this. This
answer turned out to be yes. I don’t
have access to the print versions, but I found three sources through Google
books that made explicit connections between the two. For example, White & Hellerich (1998) quote
from this essay when comparing Derrida’s and Bateson’s ideas of
difference. White (1998) and Johnson (1993) also draw the
comparison. For example, White (1998)
makes the point that both are “substituting dynamic forms of differentiation…
for the static ideas that have come to characterize the Western system of
knowledge” (p. 23). I would have to
understand both scholars in more depth to capture the differences between their
“differences,” but I did find the similarity interesting.
I particularly liked
I had read some excerpts from Gibson before but I particularly enjoyed reading it this time. For one thing, when common phenomena are described in terms of their affordances, the effect can be rather amusing. My favorite, about water, was the observation that “its surface does not afford support for large animals with dense tissues” (131). Uh, yes!
Gibson’s
point about the fact that our default interaction with objects works on the
basis of affordances rather than qualities was insightful. It reminds me a little of prototype theory
and fuzzy categories in cognitive science in its sense of the gestalt. On the other hand, it is a fundamentally different
approach. As Gibson says, “I now suggest
that what we perceive when we look at objects are their affordances, not their
qualities. We can discriminate the dimensions of difference if required to do
so in an experiment, but what the object affords us is what we normally pay
attention to. The special combination of qualities into which an object can be
analyzed is ordinarily not noticed” (134). I think this is true.
Above I mentioned White & Hellerich’s
(1998) comparison of Derrida’s and Bateson’s ideas about difference. The quote from the essay that they included
was one that also caught my attention: “In fact, what we mean by information… is
a difference which makes a difference” (p. 459).
For me, the most helpful strategy for
understanding Bateson were his examples, and of these, the best was about the
blind man. I quote it in full because I
feel like it encapsulates Bateson’s main point in the article:
“Suppose I am a blind man, and I use a stick. I go tap, tap, tap. Where do I start? Is my mental system bounded at the handle of the stick? Is it bounded by my skin? Does it start halfway up the stick? Does it start at the tip of the stick? But these are nonsense questions. The stick is a pathway along which transforms of difference are being transmitted. The way to delineate the system is to draw the limiting line in such a way that you do not cut any of these pathways in ways which leave things inexplicable. If what you are trying to explain is a given piece of behavior, such as the locomotion of the blind man, then, for this purpose, you will need the street, the stick, the man; the street, the stick, and so on, round and round. But when the blind man sits down to eat his lunch, his stick and its messages will no longer be relevant—if it is his eating that you want to understand” (p. 465).
References
Bateson, G. (1972). Steps
to an ecology of mind: Collected essays in anthropology, psychiatry, evolution,
and epistemology. San Francisco: Chandler Pub. Co.
Gibson, J. J. (1986). The
ecological approach to visual perception. Hillsdale,
New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.
Johnson, C. (1993). System
and writing in the philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Norman, D. (n.d.). Affordances and
design. Retrieved from http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordances_and.html
White, D. R. (1998). Postmodern
ecology: Communication, evolution, and play. Albany: State University of
New York Press.
White, D. R., & Hellerich, G.
(1998). Labyrinths of the mind: The
self in the postmodern age. Albany, NY: State Univ. of New York Press.
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