EVENT DETAILS

Thinking Affordances: Philosophy, Rhetoric, Design

Co-Sponsored by the Composition Program, the Department of English, the UCI Design Alliance, the Claire Trevor School for the Arts, and the Program in Planning, Policy and Design

Keynote speakers
Harry Heft
Andrea Scarentino

Followed by a panel of UCI respondents

Friday, February 22, 2013
9:30am - 2:00pm
Humanities Gateway 1030

9:30 Convene (coffee and snack)
9:45 Greetings and introductions (Julia Lupton, English)

10:00 “Hiding in Plain Sight: What are affordances, and why did it take us so long to find them?”
Harry Heft, Professor of Psychology, Denison University
Introduced by Sanjoy Mazumdar, Planning, Policy and Design

11:00 “Emotions as Affordance Prioritizers”
Andrea Scarantino, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Neuroscience, Georgia State University
Introduced by Daniel M. Gross, English

12:00 Lunch (hosted in room)

12:45 UCI Faculty Panel: Unfolding Affordances
Presentations by Daniel M. Gross (English),Keith Murphy (Anthropology), Jerome Christensen (English), Simon Penny (Art), and Sanjoy Mazumdar (Planning, Policy and Design). Moderated by Miles Coolidge, Art

2:00 Conference ends.

3:15 Additional event sponsored by Planning, Policy and Design with Harry Heft
"Ecological psychology and Environmental Design: Why the Approach to Perceiving Matters"
300b Social Ecology 1. Contact person: Professor Sanjoy Mazumdar, mazumdar@uci.edu


The term “affordance” was first developed in 1977 by the ecological psychologist James J. Gibson to describe the way in which creatures perceive their environments as scenes of action. Affordance has emerged as a vital concept in design studies, cognitive science, philosophy of mind, human-computer interface (HCI) research, branding and marketing, and environmental psychology. Humanists are taking up affordances as a way of understanding reading practices and interfaces, the relation between play texts and dramaturgy, and the thematization of objects and environments in fictional and poetic works. This conference brings together scholars from several fields, including psychology, philosophy, English, anthropology, design, and the arts, for a collective discussion of affordances today.

Sponsored by the Humanities Collective, the Composition program, the Department of English, the Center for Ethnography, the Department of Planning, Policy and Design, and the Claire Trevor School of the Arts. Free and open to the public. For event information, contact Julia Lupton (jrlupton@uci.edu) or Daniel M. Gross (dgross@uci.edu).