Where Are Cities Leading Us To?

Abstract

They have unity relative to the posture and behavior of the animal being considered. (7) Gibson uses the example of the ecological niche to further his point about affordances: that they (both affordances and niches) are “an invariant combination of variables.” (8) Gibson’s definition is rooted in the holistic perception of the object, distinguished from all of its components. (9) He also posits that perception is purely visual; that that is enough to determine an affordance (relative to the user). (10) This is problematic because according to contemporary neuroscientific models perception is an interpretative topdown and bottom-up process that recognizes and organizes multisensory information to formulate a mental representation of an environment. (11, 12) In his 1988 book The Design of Everyday Things, Donald Norman famously incorporated the concept of affordances as part of a conceptual design model to help guide the design process. (13)He saw affordances as communicative user guides that were inherent within the object and were understood without “pictures, labels, or instructions.” (14) Usage of directions to explain ‘simple’ things mean the design was a failure. (15) Essentially, this contested Gibson’s understanding of a hegemonic visual perception and reappropriated it to more accurately use the “experiences of the observer” rather than “referencing an observer through an object,” as Gibson did. (16) This made affordances less transactional, as Norman also accounted for socio-cultural constraints of affordances; meaning, affordances could not be called truly subjective as the cultural and thus behavioral and social norms influenced each other cyclically, impacting the ‘common’ affordance perception. This is furthered by the notion of affordances as ‘embodied perception’ and ‘embodied concepts’, as sensorymotor analyses of environment are universal among humans. Yet simultaneously, the evaluation of an affordance remained subjective to the user (within the behavioral and sociocultural sphere). If we utilize a ‘designer only perspective’, we fall prey to disconnecting from our users. Bryan Lawson in, How Designers Think? The Design Process Demystified writes, The primary purpose of a greenhouse is clearly to trap heat from the sun, so we can begin by measuring or calculating the thermal efficiency of a whole range of possible greenhouses. Unfortunately, we are still some way from describing how satisfactory our greenhouse will appear to individual gardeners. They may well also want to know how much it will cost to buy, how long it will last, or how easy it will be to erect and maintain, and probably, what it will look like in the garden. The greenhouse then, must satisfy criteria of solar gain, cost, durability, ease of assembly, appearance and perhaps many others. (17) We could consider the greenhouse as solely a functional entity; to say that it would be ‘successful’ as a design if it just efficiently traps heat, and we could only consider this quality of it. However, to do so, would be to disregard the utilization of the space in order to allow it to function. How the gardener feels inside of the building is important, as well as the other operational factors of the greenhouse which the gardener must use to successfully complete their tasks. A designer who is not a gardener will not understand the nuances that exist with the job, and this reinforces the need for a common language between the user and designer of a space. This example drives the idea that design is a practice and a communication; it is reliant on responses to the design and thus, the usage of the design, and a communicative channel must exist (cont’d from 37) to allow this understanding. There is a reciprocal determinism that exists between user and design: both shape each other, and as a result of that shaping, behaviour and usage is influenced: basic-level concepts are defined by the convergence of (1) gestalt object perception (observed or imaged) and (2) motor programmes that define the prototypical interaction with the object (again, performed or imaged). Thus, a chair looks a certain way (and we can imagine how it looks) and it is used for sitting in a certain position (and we can imaging sitting that way). (18) Let us draw a direct metaphor between design as communication and language: our ultimate form of communication. Let us specifically consider the Sound Image. The Sound Image, first defined by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss Linguist, in his book Course in General Linguistics, is perhaps an essential paradigm of understanding why and how a common language operates. (19) The characteristic role of language with respect to thought is not to create a material phonic means for expressing ideas but to serve as a link between thought and sound, under conditions that of necessity bring about the reciprocal delimitations of units. Thought, chaotic by nature, has to become ordered in the process of its decomposition. Neither are thoughts given material form nor are sounds transformed into mental entities; the somewhat mysterious fact is rather that “thought-sound” implies division, and that language works out its units while taking shape between two shapeless masses. (20) The link between ‘thought and sound’ that Saussure identifies is semiotic and morphologic, “that is to say, it is based on viewing the word as a meaning-making tool that unites a sound image and a concept, not a name and a thing.” (21) LIONS AND TIGERS AND CHAIRS, OH MY! Tiger. You probably just imagined a tiger. How could you not have done so? Your mind just offered you an image of one. What was your tiger doing? Standing? Growling? Sleeping? Is it an image or a film? Is it an adult or a cub? How many stripes does it have? How many whiskers? How big are its teeth? Is it superimposed on a blank background or is it in a landscape scene? In a zoo? Roaming around a city? Is it alive or a graphic representation? Is it anthropomorphized? I ask all these questions to simply say: my tiger is different from yours. The sound-image inevitably produces a different image for me than it does you, and this is a variant for any endless multitude of reasons (education, geographic location, culture, etc). However, we both know what a tiger is. We both agree on the general concept of a tiger. I don’t have to ask you to produce exactly what your mind offered you for us to have a conversation about tigers or to have a consensus on what they are. This is language and thus this is design, is it not? That shifting consensus of definitions and purposes, respectively, that are reciprocally deterministic, that carry across images or purposes to communicate. We practice language or a way of speaking, a way of creating a series of sound-images in logical formats to explain what we mean or imagine. We practice design through the usage of objects which are the actualized sound images of the designer. Chair. Again, my mental representation of a chair is different from yours. But we both know what the purpose of the chair is: to sit. How do we know what it feels like ‘to sit’? The answer here lies in the notion that affordances are also a form of embodied perception. The simple idea of ‘chair’ as a sound-image, and by extension its linguistic understanding, is defined by its purpose (sitting) and by its practice (when someone sits on it, we can call it a chair as is evident by ‘non-chair’ objects like a stack of books). However, even if we don’t enact an affordance, we are still able to recognize what its purpose is; a chair, for example, has much embedded symbolism. A throne, which few sit on, is still recognizable as a chair. The essence of the chair carries through in the design just as the word ‘chair’ carries that representational significance of understanding that a chair affords the option to sit on it. AFFORDANCES AS EMBODIED PERCEPTION Affordances are not purely conceptual. The embodi ment theory is important as it offers an explanation on why the world and its representations become meaningful to us. Our sensory and motor capacities, next to our sensorimotor knowledge (cont’d from 36) depend on more than just the workings of the brain and spinal cord; they also depend on the workings of other parts of the body, such as the sensory organs, the muscles, sensory organs, the musculoskeletal system, and relevant parts of the peripheral nervous system (e.g., sensory and motor nerves). (22, 23) Bruner, a cognitive psychologist who was concerned with how knowledge is represented and organized, assumed that all perceptual experience is the end product of a categorization process. However, Ulrich Neisser, often referred to as the father of cognitive psychology, has argued that some kinds of perceptual experience (such as visual tracking) may be more analogue than categorical. Nonetheless, many forms of perception are based on pattern recognition which is about classification of stimuli and categorization. (24) Eleanor Rosch represented the successive generation of cognitive psychologists and proposed that categorisation is embodied given by our interactions not just by objective properties of objects in the world, as a long philosophical tradition had assumed. (25) Without us—without the way we sit and the way we form images—the wide range of objects we have called “chairs” do not form a category. Our concepts must also be characterised relative to such a body-based understanding. Gallese and Lakoff argue “that the sensory-motor system not only provides structure to conceptual content but also characterises the semantic content of concepts in terms of the way that we function with our bodies in the world.” (26) This discourse is based on the finding that imagining and doing use a shared neural substrate: canonical neurons.