What Affordance Can Teach Us About Enabling Processes of Knowledge Creation

Abstract

Innovation and knowledge creation does not take place in a vacuum. Apart from communicating human cognitive systems we can find heavy interaction with the organizational environment, technology, architectural space, etc. The approach of Enabling Spaces takes this fact seriously and as its main point of departure for supporting knowledge processes, and in particular innovation processes. J.J.Gibson describes his idea of affordance as something that the environment offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. Following these theoretical lines as well as the approach of extended cognition from cognitive science, the concept of enabling (as opposed to managing or controlling) and an enabling environment for the context of knowledge work will be developed. The guiding question is how such environmental structures can facilitate our cognitive (and social) processes of knowledge creation, reflecting our mental models, etc. in various dimensions (epistemological, emotional, social, technological, cognitive, architectural, etc.). Theoretical foundations, a possible design process, as well as practical examples of such (built) Enabling Spaces will be presented (in the fields of innovation, office design, and universities).