Embodied Making

Abstract

Perception is often understood as an individual's mirroring of the objects in the world 'out there' .The influential ecological psychologist James Gibson (1904Gibson ( -1979) ) wanted to avoid such a division between subject and object.He developed a new account of the perception of the environment that breaks with the idea of static mirroring and rather makes activity central.According to Gibson, daily life entails moving around, engaging with and enacting the 'action possibilities' of the environment, which he calls affordances.1 Affordances are possibilities for action offered by the environment -an environment which, in the case of humans, is to a large extent man-made.The action possibilities people have, do not only depend on the way our environment has been formed materially by earlier activities, but also on people's abilities and thus on the patterns of activity that have been cultivated by socio-cultural practices.2The affordance of sitting on a wooden chair created by a carpenter, for instance, exists only against a wider background of socio-cultural practices of sitting on chairs, rather than say sitting on the floor or perhaps living in a non-sedentary way altogether.3Making can transform the meaning of materials.Once the carpenter has transformed a heap of wood into a chair, this new constellation of wood can be experienced by a person as offering an attractive possibility to sit.Integrating the concept of affordances, the increasingly influential paradigm of embodied/ enactive cognition has changed the way science understands the relationship between people and their social and material surroundings (Chemero 2009;Di Paolo et al. 2010;Thompson 2007; Rietveld 2008a;Noë 2012;Malafouris 2013;Varela et al. 1991;Dreyfus 1972).Embodied/enactive cognition takes seriously the fact that people come to acquire skills and abilities by actively engaging in socio-cultural practices.Such embodied skills in turn structure the way they engage with or 'enact' the action possibilities offered by the socio-material environment.The implications of this new paradigm in cognitive science for making meaningful art and architecture are under-explored.In this chapter, we will show how it can offer a philosophical framework for understanding the process of making that takes affordances as well as the embodiment and experience of Erik Rietveld -9789004515413 Downloaded from Brill.