Let’s talk about affordances: some implications of the social-material affordances approach

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 and not just the evidently artistic and artful ones. In this context, I plea for a cognitive science program that adds to the rich resources art has to offer for understanding the whole spectrum of practices and deals with the complexity of social, material, and cultural practices.