In this commentary on Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, we exemplify with one of our design cases for project Expedition RWS 2050, how Rietveld’s and our method are complementary. Within this project, RWS invited us to contribute our design skills and make relevant future scenarios experienceable. To scaffold imaginative discussions about everyday life in 2050 with a cross-section of the Dutch population

The text presents a discussion of possible connections between the ideas of Erik Rietveld and concepts of relationality and materiality in modern architecture, with a special focus on Dutch Structuralism and the New Brutalism.

In response to Erik Rietveld’s text “The affordances of art for making technologies,” this commentary probes art’s affordances for what Rietveld calls behavioral “changeability.” I ask, how can a view of art’s affordances help to better understand collective and relational affects and habitual behaviors? Can artworks help to “radically change the affordances available in our surroundings,” to generate

Rather than conserving or ignoring historically burdened heritage, RAAAF intervene. Their responses are striking, sometimes dramatic or destructive. Prompted by Rietveld’s discussion of the Luftschloss project, I compare some other places with difficult pasts which engage our embodied and sensory responses, without such active redirection or disruption. Ross Gibson’s concept of a ‘memoryscope’ helps

General value functions (GVFs) in the reinforcement learning (RL) literature are long-term predictive summaries of the outcomes of agents following specific policies in the environment. Affordances as perceived action possibilities with specific valence may be cast into predicted policy-relative goodness and modeled as GVFs. A systematic explication of this connection shows that GVFs and especially

In Erik Rietveld’s inaugural lecture “The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies,” art is presented as a valuable avenue to enrich the environment with material and social affordances that may enhance human meaning giving practices. In this contribution, I make a distinction between conventional and unconventional practices and argue for an account of sociomateriality that covers the whole spectrum

The adaptive morphology of a robot, such as shape adaptation, plays a significant role in adapting its behaviors. Shape adaptation should ideally be achieved without considerable cost, like the power required to deform the robot’s body, and therefore, it is reasonably considered as the last resort in classical rigid robots. However, the last decade has seen an increasing interest in soft robots: robots

We introduce a method that permits to co-evolve the body and the control properties of robots. It can be used to adapt the morphological traits of robots with a hand-designed morphological bauplan or to evolve the morphological bauplan as well. Our results indicate that robots with co-adapted body and control traits outperform robots with fixed hand-designed morphologies. Interestingly, the advantage

The ability to change one’s behaviour based on past experience has obvious fitness benefits. Drawing from past experience requires some kind of information storage and retrieval. The acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum has previously been shown to use stored information about negative stimuli. Here, we repeatedly exposed the slime mould to three stimuli with differing levels of potential risk:

In this commentary, I raise one question and one critical comment about Rietveld’s normative claim that ‘artistic practices afford embedding technologies better in society’ (2019, p. 5). In what exact sense is this the case? It seems that Rietveld offers two interconnected but conceptually distinct answers to this question. The first focuses on art’s habit-breaking possibilities. The second concerns

In recent decades, several theories have claimed to explain the teleological causality of organisms as a function of self-organising and self-producing processes. The most widely cited theories of this sort are variations of autopoiesis, originally introduced by Maturana and Varela. More recent modifications of autopoietic theory have focused on system organisation, closure of constraints and autonomy

The response asks about the relationship between artist and audience in the RAAAF artworks. Is the artist an Autonomous Innovator who breaches the ties with the past and the environment? Or is the aesthetic practice located in the creation of relationships around these objects, hence expanding the artwork by using know-how, experiences and enthusiasm of the audience/users?

This short note addresses the question whether Rietveld’s account of visual arts and adaptive behaviour be extended to literature.

Starting from the understanding of architecture as an existential art, this commentary highlights the relevance of Rietveld’s view on the affordances of art for making technologies in two ways: (a) first, by discussing the value of the notion of affordances for educating architecture students in thinking what a space can do and increasing their sensitivity for understanding and incorporating the diversity

This contribution takes as point of departure the particular response-ability allowed by the contemporary choreographic performance works of settler (Canadian) visual artist Karen Ginger Guttman, in which the visitor-beholder’s body becomes involved in the choreographic ‘dance’. These site-situated works echo the Rietveld’s works, but Guttman’s site performances take place in a residential environment

Rietveld discusses three skills that artistic practices have to offer to makers of technologies for embedding such technologies in society. An ecological dynamics model of skill learning empowers the embedding of Rietveld’s described skills in three social domains: technology makers, artworkers, and visitors of such artworks.

Upon starting a collective endeavour, it is important to understand your partners’ preferences and how strongly they commit to a common goal. Establishing a prior commitment or agreement in terms of posterior benefits and consequences from those engaging in it provides an important mechanism for securing cooperation. Resorting to methods from Evolutionary Game Theory (EGT), here we analyse how prior

Responding to Erik Rietveld’s inaugural lecture, this commentary asks which bodies and what sites of design and architecture are centralized when thinking about “The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies”? Departing from personal experience and Nicholas Mirzoeff’s counterhistory of visuality, I analyze what it means to imagine “the end of sitting.” Through an engagement with crip theory and disability

We commend Rietveld’s affordance-based approach to art and architecture for foregrounding an oft-neglected area in the cognitive sciences: the material dimension of human cognition, creativity and imagination. We suggest that supplementing the cross-disciplinary approach that Rietveld calls for with insights from archaeology and anthropology can not only help us create futures ‘with human touch’ but

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of freedom of relevant choice, that is, associated with performance success, on the motor learning. Forty players of both sexes (21.2 ± 2.4 years) participated in the study and were divided into four experimental groups: alternated, random, choice, and yoked. The task was the Handball 7-m throw, in specific right and left side throw. Participants

The work of Rietveld and his colleagues offers an engaging and valuable framework for considering the relationship between art, technology, culture and habit, and challenges us to consider our ethical perspective on these things.

Gibson once suggested that his ecological approach could provide architecture and design with a new theoretical basis. Erik Rietveld takes up this suggestion—the concept of affordances figures prominently not only in his philosophical and scientific work but also in the design practices he is engaged in. However, as Gibson introduced affordances as a functional concept, it seems ill-suited to capture

Rietveld’s conception of artistic practices and artworks allows us to engage with nature in a radically different manner: in a way that is more active and alive than we routinely do within the practices of philosophy and cognitive sciences. I argue that Rietveld’s material playgrounds allow us to challenge our understanding of matter as purely passive and devoid of agency; they show us that nature’s

I briefly reflect on the work of John Stewart and his instrumental role in the development of enactive cognitive science, his outstanding ability to communicate across disciplines, and his research obsessions.

Responsiveness to affordances that are salient in our conventional practices is usually automatic and unreflective—for good reasons. Responsiveness to unconventional affordances, by contrast, must be enforced. This is what artistic interventions of studio RAAAF do. I argue that it is precisely the fact that affordances are more or less forced on us that makes it possible for us to relate to them freely

It is usually a mark of good design when technologies and tools that mediate goal-directed action are such that the user’s attentional focus is maintained on the intended ends of action rather than on the technologies and tools themselves. When the mediators become the focus, the continuity of goal-directed action is disrupted, and the flow of action can be re-directed. What then is the purpose of

We take the approach developed by Rietveld and RAAAF to be a paradigm example of a much-needed development in embodied cognitive science: applying the insights gained into the nature of cognition back to embodied cognition itself, back to the practice of bodily engagements with our sociocultural environments. Rietveld’s work is groundbreaking precisely because it stands almost alone as a prototype

Aggregation, a widely observed behavior in social insects, is the gathering of individuals on any location or on a cue. The former being called the self-organized aggregation, and the latter being called the cue-based aggregation. One of the fascinating examples of cue-based aggregation is the thermotactic behavior of young honeybees. Young honeybees aggregate on optimal temperature zones in the hive

This reflection on Erik Rietveld’s The Affordances of Art for Making Technologies addresses, first, what it is to engage in material philosophy and make material propositions and then, second, what different materialities, or rather different ways of handling materialities, allow material philosophers to say. It notes that solidity is not an intrinsic property of any stuff. If only they are handled

Erik Rietveld’s lecture describes the creation of architectural works from the point of view of the architects. We are curious about architectural space as a living system: what happens once the architects have left? We introduce the space syntax notion of virtual community, and suggest that this is compatible with Rietveld’s distinction between the field and the landscape of affordances.

The explosion of online knowledge has made knowledge, paradoxically, difficult to find. A web or journal search might retrieve thousands of articles, ranked in a manner that is biased by, for example, popularity or eigenvalue centrality rather than by informed relevance to the complex query. With hundreds of thousands of articles published each year, the dense, tangled thicket of knowledge grows even

Sensorimotor theory of perception has been criticized for its ambiguity about the need for internal representations and the lack of a proper account of agency and subjective experience. The book under review offers a compelling non-representational, world-involving interpretation, and operationalization of this theory, showing that alternatives to representationalism are viable. It also provides a

Peer-to-peer learning paradigm is seldom used in studying how farmers can increase yield. In this article, agent-based modelling has been applied to study the chances of dairy farmers increasing annual milk yield by learning better farming strategies from each other. Two sets of strategies were considered; in one set (S), each farmer agent would possess a number of farming strategies based on their

Taking up Rietveld’s challenge for philosophers to join with artists in investigating the questions of how to live better, this comment argues (a) that this conjunction of philosophy and art is already underway in the discipline of anthropology, (b) that it need not be limited to non-verbal investigations and (c) that a focus on the performative power of words enables us to close the gap between visual

Postural control is a complex process requiring both sensory and motor responses. Perturbation-based balance training has emerged as an effective fall prevention intervention, which provides physical postural perturbations for postural control training and adaptation. With the advent of technology, virtual reality (VR) has also been used for fall prevention training by providing visual postural perturbations

In this study, we use mobile robots as physical entities to model the iterated learning of collections of forms that consist of randomly generated movement sequences. The robots implement an abstract model of embodied iterated social learning in which the forms evolve due to limited perceptual abilities of the robots during multiple learning cycles. It is shown that shared chunks that consisted of

In this article, an adaptive consensus model that considers individual disappointment emotion is proposed for emergency multi-attribute group decision-making (MAGDM) problems with hesitant fuzzy linguistic information. Subsequently, it is applied to choose the optimal emergency alternative(s) for the prevention and control of COVID-19 on a college campus. The main innovations and contributions of this

In this article, I aim to elucidate minimality in cooperation by drawing on a previously developed multi-dimensional approach to cooperation. This approach provides a useful framework to locate any cooperative phenomenon at a specific point on the continua of different dimensions. That point, in turn, determines the criteria for a particular cooperative phenomenon to emerge. Thus, on one hand, the

This article considers the adaptive setting and probable origins of human aesthetic capabilities, using evidence of the Acheulean tradition in the last million years, and highlighting the importance of the preceding and enveloping social and technological contexts. Acheulean bifaces, made from about 1.75 to 0.1 Ma, often with an appearance of symmetry, give windows on crucial interlocking aspects of

It has been claimed that post-cognitivist approaches to cognition might be compatible with computationalism. A growing number of authors argue that if computations are theorized as non-representational and mechanistic, then many concepts typical of the enactive approach can also be used in computational contexts and vice versa. In this article, we evaluate the solidity and coherence of this potential

This essay introduces a special issue focused on 4E cognition (cognition as embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) in the Lower Palaeolithic. In it, we review the typological and representational cognitive approaches that have dominated the past 50 years of paleoanthropology. These have assumed that all representations and computations take place only inside the head, which implies that the archaeological

The purpose of this article is to review the evolution and function of the cerebellum, particularly in regard to its role in creativity and expert stone knapping. First, the article reviews the history of the cerebellum, its evolution and phylogenetics, and its concerted evolution with various brain regions. It also notes the critical role of the cerebellum and the cerebro-cerebellar network in its

This study aimed to examine the effects of age and the task difficulty on postural sway, variability and complexity. The participants were 90 able-bodied individuals including children (n = 39; age: 5.89 ± 0.94 years), young adults (n = 30; age: 23.23 ± 1.61 years) and older adults (n = 21; age: 64.59 ± 5.24 years) who took part in different balance tasks that had different levels of cognitive and

Through brain-inspired modeling studies, cognitive neurorobotics aims to resolve dynamics essential to different emergent phenomena at the level of embodied agency in an object environment shared with human beings. This article is a review of ongoing research focusing on model dynamics associated with human self-consciousness. It introduces the free energy principle and active inference in terms of

How the boundaries of the mind should be drawn with respect to action and the material world is a core research question that cognitive archaeology shares with contemporary cognitive sciences. The study of hominin technical thinking, as in the case of stone tool making, is a good way to bring that question to the fore. This article argues that archaeologists who study lithic artefacts and their transformations

Organized as a satellite to the annual Conference on Complex Systems, the Evolution of Cultural Complexity held its inaugural workshop in Tempe, Arizona, in 2015, a second in Cancún, Mexico, in 2017, and a third in Thessaloniki, Greece, in 2018. The goal of those satellite sessions was to bring together a community of researchers from different fields who had interests in the evolution of cultural

The aim of this study was to determine the effect of contextual interference on learning of adapted sailing for people with spinal cord injury. Seven participants with traumatic spinal injury were selected to undergo learning in an adapted boat equipped with wind-measuring instrument. A learning program, defined by two conditions, (1) blocked practice and (2) random practice, was applied. In blocked

Tool use can be considered in terms of purposeful behaviour. This emphasis on ‘purpose’ hides a host of assumptions about the nature of cognition and its relationship with physical activity. In particular, a notion of ‘purpose’ might assume that this is teleological which, in turn, requires a model of a desired end state of an action that can be projected onto the environment. Such a model is fundamental

While ecological psychology and embodied approaches to cognition have gained traction within the literature on non-human primate tool use, a fear of making assumptions on behalf of animal minds means that their application has been conservative, often retaining the methodological individualism of the cognitivist approach. As a result, primate models for technical and cognitive evolution, rooted in

Boundaries are prominent ingredients of reality, including—most importantly—the boundaries of organisms and the perceived boundaries of things (their surfaces). It is also customary to think of minds as kinds of bounded loci for thoughts, representations, and other internal entities, targeting the borderline between the internal domain and the external world as a genuine barrier. Therefore, not surprisingly

The increase of violence in Mexico and consequent suffering during the last decades is evident, but its effects over feelings and moral judgments remain uncertain. We used journalistic news showing real-life situations to investigate the effects of facing violence over the experience of four moral emotions which represent powerful impulses for social actions in situations of suffering linked to violence:

Herrera Pérez, C., Sánchez-Escribano, M. G., & Sanz, R. (2012). The morphofunctional approach to emotion modelling in robotics. Adaptive Behavior, 20(5), 388-404. DOI: 10.1177/1059712312451604.

The social brain hypothesis (SBH) has played a prominent role in interpreting the relationship between human social, cognitive and technological evolution in archaeology and beyond. This article examines how the SBH has been applied to the Palaeolithic material record, and puts forward a critique of the approach. Informed by Material Engagement Theory (MET) and its understanding of material agency

This study aims to determine processes and procedures for the analysis of the behavior of brain signals in clinical trials before and after different intervention protocols involving transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS). In this study, PubMed and Cochrane databases were searched for original articles describing clinical trials that used electroencephalography to analyze the behavior of brain

Achieving efficient and reliable self-organization in groups of autonomous robots is a fundamental challenge in swarm robotics. Even simple states of collective motion, such as group translation or rotation, require nontrivial algorithms, sensors, and actuators to be achieved in real-world scenarios. We study here the capabilities and limitations in controlling experimental robot swarms of a decentralized

Traditional typological, technical, and cognitive approaches to early stone tools have taken an implicit Cartesian stance concerning the nature of mind. In many cases, this has led to interpretations of early technology that overemphasize its human-like features. By eschewing an epistemic mediator, 4E approaches to cognition (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) are in a better position to make

Today aging of society is becoming increasingly important. Many people want to live at home as long as possible. Very often this leads to accidents at home, which are unnoticed for a long time and therefore cause severe complications. We propose a cyber-physical system consisting of sensors for motion, light, temperature, and so on, which monitors the behavior of elderly people but is non-invasive

Humans leverage material forms for unique cognitive purposes: We recruit and incorporate them into our cognitive system, exploit them to accumulate and distribute cognitive effort, and use them to recreate phenotypic change in new individuals and generations. These purposes are exemplified by writing, a relatively recent tool that has become highly adept at eliciting specific psychological and behavioral

I provide some historical perspective on the development of the “minimally cognitive behavior” research program and its relation to “minimal cognition.”

Spatial information can be valuable, but new environments may be perceived as risky and thus often evoke fear responses and risk-averse exploration strategies such as thigmotaxis or wall-following behavior. Individual differences in risk-taking (boldness) and thigmotaxis have been reported in natural taxa, which may benefit their survival. In neurorobotic, the common approach is to reproduce cognitive