Driving Gibson: QBD #12:

Affordances, Ecological Psychology and a Life Given to the Future

Photo by SOULSANA on Unsplash

This is a summary of my research conversation with Harry Heft, a distinguished professor in environmental and ecological psychology who has been furthering the work of (the now famous) JJ Gibson and teaching about the potentials of ecological psychology for over 40 years. He has been a committed teacher, showing up every day to try and help his students become the best people they can be, taking the slow but authentic road, and sticking with environmental and ecological psychology as it has grown into a field many now appreciate.

In fact, from some perspectives, today it can seem as though everyone wants to be part of Gibson’s world, even those who disagree with it; it’s hard not to feel the presence of James J. Gibson across the sciences.

In many ways, JJ Gibson and his wife, the equally prominent psychologist Eleanor Gibson, are the parents of ecological psychology. Although JJ Gibson died in 1979 and Eleanor in 2002, the reputation of ecological psychology and especially ideas (of JJ Gibson’s) such as the term ‘affordance’ have become rather trendy in some STEM worlds.

Harry knew both of the Gibsons. Eleanor Gibson asked Harry to drive her husband, JJ, to teach at a university near Cornell (which is where JJ Gibson usually taught) a few evenings every week. Harry was spending a year at Cornell as a student, and he took this opportunity to read Gibson’s (then still unpublished) manuscript for The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems and ask him about it on the long car rides. In some ways, Heft has been driving ecological psychology forward ever since.

We discuss how JJ Gibson’s work influenced Harry’s future, how he came to understand and extend the idea of ‘affordance’, what that word means, why it is so popular these days, and what it might do for us in terms of our relationships to the wider world. Below we explore some of the main ideas addressed in our conversation. I also link to some important sources and places where you can find out more about these subjects, or read the original work.