Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - AFFORDS-HIGHER (Skilled Intentionality for \'Higher\' Embodied Cognition: Joining forces with a field of affordances in flux)

Teaser

Skilled Intentionality for \'Higher\' Embodied Cognition: Joining Forces with a Field of Affordances in FluxIt is often assumed that embodied/enactive cognitive science has sensible things to say about so-called ‘lower’ cognition (say grasping a glass or riding a bike), but...

Summary

Skilled Intentionality for \'Higher\' Embodied Cognition: Joining Forces with a Field of Affordances in Flux

It is often assumed that embodied/enactive cognitive science has sensible things to say about so-called ‘lower’ cognition (say grasping a glass or riding a bike), but not about ‘higher’ cognition (say using creative imagination or comforting a sad friend); that it can deal only with the immediately present environment but not with the absent or the abstract, such as for example a plan for a new building. Based on my experience in the practice of architecture I believe that these dichotomies are largely artificial. Both ‘lower’ and ‘higher’ cognition, can actually be regarded as skilled activities situated in socio-cultural practices. I have begun developing an account of situated skilled activities that is more unified than the ‘higher’-‘lower’ dichotomy it replaces. I call this the Skilled Intentionality Framework. Skilled intentionality is simultaneous coordination with multiple affordances - possibilities for action provided to us by the environment. If we want to understand the relation between mind and world, skilled intentionality is crucial because it is the kind of intentionality that characterizes most of the things individuals do: in everyday human life and in expert activities. It is not an exceptional type of cognition but the norm. The overarching aim of my interdisciplinary ERC StG-project AFFORDS-HIGHER is to further develop the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF). I want to understand the way in which the action possibilities offered by the surrounding environment scaffold skilled action and ‘higher’ cognition.

The project is organized around the following three subprojects:
- Subproject 1 has the key objective of further developing the Skilled Intentionality Framework. It will focus on theoretical issues related to the three main aspects of the ‘individual-environment’ system: the changing environment, the active individual situated in a particular place, and the field of relevant affordances that results from the self-organized coordination of an individual with her dynamically changing surroundings
- The key objective of subproject 2 is to investigate affordances for ‘higher’ embodied cognition in the context of making that specific architectural Landscape of Standing Affordances. I chose to embed two team members in the practice of architecture because it is rich with ‘higher’ cognition in its demand for creative imagination, sketching, long term planning, visualization, verbalization, and the anticipation of future users’ interactions with a design.
- Subproject 3 investigates the self-organizing brain-body-environment system as a whole: how do body and brain join forces together with a field of affordances in flux? This project takes place at the crossroads between philosophy and ecological dynamical systems theory. The key objective is to understand the causal processes that enable skilled intentionality at multiple levels of analysis and over multiple time-scales, from milliseconds to years.

Work performed

The research team I composed is of excellent quality. We are about halfway through the project and have already published in several top journals and realized exhibitions with media attention worldwide. The team includes researchers of all levels. We have been able to publish in the leading journals in the relevant fields: e.g. top philosophy journal Synthese (several times), Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, as well as in The Architectural Review. We have been awarded the European Prize of Architecture (Philippe Rotthier) together with my collaborators at RAAAF and Atelier de Lyon. Our Synthese article “The anticipating brain is not a scientist” belongs to the top-3 most downloaded papers of that international journal in 2016. We have established collaborations with some of the most influential researchers in the field such as Karl Friston and Tony Chemero, which has led to important publications in the Journal of Theoretical Biology and Synthese. We have developed the Skilled Intentionality Framework (SIF) further in a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition An architect and postdoctoral researcher have been successfully embedded at the architecture practice RAAAF to investigate affordances for ‘higher’ cognition, which has led to a new process-based account affordances and skilled intentionality.

Public lectures, newspaper interviews and television items aimed at broad audiences outside the academic sphere allowed us to disseminate the project’s results to the wider public. Our affordance-based work in architecture and visual art (together with RAAAF) has attracted international attention and resulted in several new artworks (including Breaking Habits, Deltawerk // and Hidden Worlds). This work featured on popular websites like Dezeen, Designboom, and ArchDaily as well as in top publications for the architecture field like The Architectural Review and l’Architecture d’Aujourd’hui. Deltawerk // was listed as best visual art 2018 internationally by Dutch national newspaper NRC. The esteemed German weekly newspaper Die Zeit published an article about the RAAAF artwork Breaking Habits, which served as the setting for our embedded research (subproject 2). Canal+ made a television special on our proposal and experiments for the office of the future. Various Dutch national newspapers published interviews with us on our work at the crossroads of architecture, visual art and philosophy. Well-attended public lectures and/or seminars were delivered at renowned art academies, museums and other institutions such as Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Gerrit Rietveld Art Academie, Rijksacademie voor Beeldende Kunsten, Garage Museum for Contempory Art in Moscow, and the Netherlands Royal Academy of Arts & Sciences.

Final results

Besides the fundamental conceptual work in the philosophy of embodied/enactive cognitive science and related publications, my method has a second and rather unique aspect to it: it is deeply rooted in practice. Together with an embedded architect and others at RAAAF we built a new affordance-based End of Sitting art installation called ‘Breaking Habits’ for the headquarters of the Mondriaan Fund for Visual Arts. Both a Dutch science television program and the German newspaper Die Zeit interviewed us on it. Other artworks the embedded architect and PI worked on were the short film Trusted Strangers (which premiered at Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam), the art installation Hidden Worlds (Cappadox Contemporary Art), and the large artwork Deltawerk // (Landart Flevoland). Crucially, during the process of skilled making RAAAF functioned as the site for an ethnography of situated anticipation and imagination which led to a publication in philosophy journal Synthese. Over the course of the ERC StG project, our focus on real-life situations of skilled intentionality has had many advantages: strong reality checks, excellent immediate feedback, unconventional cross-fertilizations, and a deeper, integrative understanding.

Website & more info

More info: http://www.erikrietveld.com.