Affordances as possible actions: elements for a semiotic approach

[Abstract] As far as semiotic theories are concerned, new digital texts and objects emphasize the need to refocus on the intimate connection between user and interface, considered as a space where deploying and manipulating contents through repeated contacts with a sensitive area (Fontanille & Zinna, 2004; Zinna 2004). In this case, the concept of «affordance» becomes of central importance. Originally developed in the framework of Gestalt theory, the term «affordance» was subsequently reworked and made famous through the ecological approach to perception conceived by James Gibson (1966, 1979). However, the concept has successively been integrated into a more binary conception of cognition (Norman, 1988, 1998, 1999, 2007; Zhang & Patel, 2006), which seems to be responsible for the loss of much of its heuristic power. In this paper, I intend to go back to the genesis of the notion (Koffka, 1935, Visetti & Rosenthal, 1999) and propose a semiotic and dynamic reinterpretation of this concept, where affordances can be seen as dispositions to act and patterns of expectation (De Souza, 2005; Eco, 1997, 2007; Paolucci, 2007; Peirce, 1931-58; Quéré, 1999). Using Graphic User Interfaces as my object of study and developing an ecological approach to cognition, where the environment and the subject cannot be considered on the basis of binary distinction (Clark 1997, 2006, 2008; Noë 2004, 2009), I will show how semiotic activity takes place in a not infinitely brief present-time (Rosenthal, 2004, 2005), which is necessary for the development of a microgenetic activity of perception and cognition that will be intrinsically cultural. In this context, affordances may be explained as responses to a conceivable practical action made possible by habits that subjects consider on the basis of their inclusion in a system of practices and knowledge which foreshadow a specific and located horizon of actio