Affordances in Everyday Life

Affordances in Everyday Life
Author: Zakaria Djebbara
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 215
Release: 2022-08-27
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 3031086295

The concept of affordances is being increasingly used in fields beyond ecological psychology to reveal previously unexplored interdisciplinary relationships. These fields include engineering, robotics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, urban theory, architecture, computer science, and much more. As the concept is adapted for its relational meaning between an agent and the environment, or object, the meaning of the term has changed to fit the customs of the adapting field. This book maps the different shades of the term and brings insights into how it is operationalized by providing short accessible essays regardless of background. Each contribution addresses big questions around this topic such as the application of the concept on ongoing research, how to measure or identify affordances, as well as other reflective questions about the future of affordances in the field. The book is envisioned to be read by non-experts, students, and researchers from several disciplines, and fills the need for summarization across disciplines. As the many adaptations flourished from the same psychological concept, this book also aims to function as a catalyst and motivation for reinterpreting the concepts for new directions. Compared to existing books, this book aims not to span the vertical dimension of field by taking a deep dive into a niche-field—instead, this book aims to have a wide horizontal span highlighting a common concept shared by an increasing number of fields, namely affordances. As such, this book takes a different approach by attempting to summarize the different emerging applications and definitions of the concept, and make them accessible to non-experts, students, and researchers regardless of background and level.

Places, Affordances, Atmospheres

Places, Affordances, Atmospheres
Author: Taylor & Francis Group
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2021-03-31
Genre:
ISBN: 9780367727611

This book offers a diverse understanding and practical approach towards the growing area of atmosphere research, in the context of philosophy, geography and architecture. It begins by tracing back to the model of experience called the "pathic". Drawing on the phenomenology of theorists Hermann Schmitz and Gernot Böhme, introductory chapters offer a grounding for the beginnings of pathic research. The chapters go on to apply pathic framework to a range of practical cases from theatre studies to education. Atmospheres are often defined as affects one feels in a "lived space" and researchers are becoming more interested in the emotions we feel in natural and artificial environments across day to day life. By providing a critical re-evaluation of phenomenology and aesthetics, the book brings a series of unexplored and controversial subjects to light, opening up a new context for thinking about our everyday life and experiences inscribed within aesthetics, politics, literature, spatial practices and pedagogy and effectively merging abstract philosophy and concrete practice. This book is particularly poignant in the emerging field of Atmosphere and New Aesthetics research. Practitioners, academics and researchers working within Cultural Geography, Aesthetics, Art and Philosophy will find this book extremely valuable.

Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces

Atmospheres: Aesthetics of Emotional Spaces
Author: Tonino Griffero
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 181
Release: 2016-04-08
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1317177495

Originally published in Italian in 2010, this book is the first to address the theory of atmospheres in a thorough and systematic way. It examines the role of atmospheres in daily life, and defines their main characteristics. Outlining the typical phenomenological situations in which we experience atmospheres, it assesses their impact on contemporary aesthetics. It puts forward a philosophical approach which systematises a constellation of affects and climates, finds patterns in the emotional tones of different spaces (affordances) and assesses their impact on the felt body. It also critically discusses the spatial turn invoked by several of the social sciences, and argues that there is a need for a non-psychologistic rethinking of the philosophy of emotions. It provides a history of the term 'atmosphere' and of the concepts anticipating its meaning (genius loci, aura, Stimmung, numinous, emotional design and ambiance), and examines the main ontological characteristics of atmospheres and their principal phenomenological characteristics. It concludes by showing how atmospheres affect our emotions, our bodies' reactions, our state of mind and, as a result, our behaviour and judgments. Griffero assesses how atmospheres are more effective than we have been rationally willing to admit, and to what extent traditional aesthetics, unilaterally oriented towards art, has underestimated this truth.

Atmospheres and Shared Emotions

Atmospheres and Shared Emotions
Author: Dylan Trigg
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-11-26
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1000478742

This book explores the role atmospheres play in shared emotion. With insights from leading scholars in the field, Atmospheres and Shared Emotions investigates key issues such as the relation between atmospheres and moods, how atmospheres define psychopathological conditions such as anxiety and schizophrenia, what role atmospheres play in producing shared aesthetic experiences, and the significance of atmospheres in political events. Calling upon disciplinary methodologies as broad as phenomenology, film studies, and law, each of the chapters is thematically connected by a rigorous attention on the multifaceted ways atmosphere play an important role in the development of shared emotion. While the concept of atmosphere has become a critical notion across several disciplines, the relationship between atmospheres and shared emotion remains neglected. The idea of sharing emotion over a particular event is rife within contemporary society. From Brexit to Trump to Covid-19, emotions are not only experienced individually, they are also grasped together. Proceeding from the view that atmospheres can play an explanatory role in accounting for shared emotion, the book promises to make an enduring contribution to both the understanding of atmospheres and to issues in the philosophy of emotion more broadly. Offering both a nuanced analysis of key terms in contemporary debates as well as a series of original studies, the book will be a vital resource for scholars in contemporary philosophy, aesthetics, human geography, and political science.

Music as Atmosphere

Music as Atmosphere
Author: Friedlind Riedel
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2019-11-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0429631626

This book explores the atmospheric dimensions of music and sound. With multidisciplinary insights from music studies, sound studies, philosophy and media studies, chapters investigate music and sound as shared environmental feelings. This book probes into cutting edge conceptual issues at the forefront of contemporary discussions on atmosphere, atmospherology and affect. It also extends the spatial and relational focus towards fundamentally temporal questions of performance, process, timbre, resonance and personhood. The capacity of atmospheric relations to imbue a situation with an ambient feeling and to modulate social collectives is highlighted, as well as auditory experience as a means of connecting with feelings. In addition to original research, the volume features a first translation of an important text by German phenomenologist Hermann Schmitz, and a debate on affect and atmosphere between the philosophers Jan Slaby and Brian Massumi. This novel contribution to the field of music research provides a strong theoretical framework, as well as vibrant case studies, which will be invaluable reading for scholars and students of music, sound, aesthetics, media, anthropology and contemporary philosophy.

Atmosphere and Aesthetics

Atmosphere and Aesthetics
Author: Tonino Griffero
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 343
Release: 2019-11-21
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030249425

This book provides a presentation of the concept of “atmosphere” in the realm of aesthetics. An “atmosphere” is meant to be an emotional space. Such idea of “atmosphere” has been more and more subsumed by human and social sciences in the last twenty years, thereby becoming a technical notion. In many fields of the Humanities, affective life has been reassessed as a proper tool to understand the human being, and is now considered crucial. In this context, the link between atmospheres and aesthetics becomes decisive. Nowadays, aesthetics is no longer only a theory of art, but has recovered its original vocation: to be a general theory of perception conceived of as an ordinary experience of pre-logical character. In its four parts (Atmospheric turn?, Senses and Spaces, Subjects and Communities, Aesthetics and Art Theory), this volume discusses whether atmospheres could take the prominent and paradigmatic position previously held by art in order to make sense of such sensible experience of the world.

EcoResponsive Environments

EcoResponsive Environments
Author: Ian Bentley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 257
Release: 2024-04-15
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 1003859135

EcoResponsive Environments integrates our current knowledge of designing for human needs, with a deeper understanding of natural systems. The book offers both a call to action and a comprehensive yet pragmatic framework for practising the art and science of settlement design, called EcoResponsive Design. Bridging the gap between theory and generic policy on the one hand, and design for specific places and sites on the other, the book is aimed not only at the professionals involved in planning, designing and developing these places, but also the wider range of communities interested in creating better spaces for our everyday lives. EcoResponsive Design encompasses all scales, ranging from the overall form of settlements and the landscapes in which they sit, to buildings and the detailed design of public spaces. Drawing from projects, places and best practices in many different countries and contexts across the world, it demonstrates how positive changes at the local scale can be achieved for every single site, large or small. The book urges a shift in focus from individual specialisms to collaborative actions, enabling development stakeholders to negotiate a balance between short-term financial viability and longer-term environmental and social values.

Glossary of Morphology

Glossary of Morphology
Author: Federico Vercellone
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3030513246

This book is a significant novelty in the scientific and editorial landscape. Morphology is both an ancient and a new discipline that rests on Goethe's heritage and re-forms it in the present through the concepts of form and image. The latter are to be understood as structural elements of a new cultural grammar able to make the late modern world intelligible. In particular, compared to the original Goethean project, but also to C.P. Snow's idea of unifying the “two cultures”, the fields of morphological culture that are the object of this glossary have profoundly changed. The ever-increasing importance of the image as a polysemic form has made the two concepts absolutely transitive, so to speak. This is concomitant with the emergence of a culture that revolves around the image, attracting the verbal logos into its orbit. Incidentally, even the hermeneutic relationship between past and present relies more and more on the image, causing deep changes in cultural environments. Form and image are not just bridging concepts, as in the field of ancient morphology, but real transitive concepts that define the state of a culture. From the Internet to smartphones, television, advertising, etc., we are witnessing – as Horst Bredekamp observes – an immense mass of images that fill our time and affect the most diverse areas of our culture. The ancient connection between science and art recalled by Goethe emerges with unusual evidence thanks to intersecting patterns and expressive forms that are sometimes shared by different forms of knowledge. Creating a glossary and a culture of these intersections is the task of morphology, which thus enters into the boundaries between aesthetics, art, design, advertising, and sciences (from mathematics to computer science, to physics, and to biology), in order to provide the founding elements of a grammar and a syntax of the image. The latter, in its formal quality, both expressive and symbolic, is a fundamental element in the unification of the various kinds of knowledge, which in turn come to be configured, in this regard, also as styles of vision. The glossary is subdivided into contiguous sections, within a complex framework of cross-references. In addition to the two curators, the book features the collaboration of a team of scholars from the individual disciplines appearing in the glossary.

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics
Author:
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2022-04-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9004468803

Shusterman’s Somaesthetics is a wide-ranging collection of penetrating essays by twelve scholars examining in rich detail the many dimensions of philosopher Richard Shusterman’s pragmatism and somaesthetics, complemented by his own chapter of responses to these scholars

The affective city

The affective city
Author: Stefano Catucci
Publisher: LetteraVentidue Edizioni
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2022-01-21
Genre: Architecture
ISBN: 8862426798

Cities are not made only of stone: they harbor ways of life, practices, movements, moods, atmospheres, feelings. Yet the ineffable nature of affects has long deprived human passions of a meaningful role when it comes to observing urban space and envisioning its future transformation. With this book, we explore the contemporary city and its transitional conditions from a different perspective: a quest to understand how the space of collective life and the feelings this engenders are connected, how they mutually give form to each other. In an interdisciplinary collection of essays, The Affective City means to open a discussion on the “soft” presences animating the world of urban objects: beyond the city built out of mere things, this book’s focus is on the forces that make urban life emerge, thrive, flourish, but also wither, and sometimes die. A task crucial for the survival of cities as human habitats, in an urban world that – with every passing day – seems to draw closer a crisis.