Environmental Affordances: Some Meetings Between Artificial Aesthetics and Interior Design Theory

Abstract

The contribution supports the following thesis: the use of semiotic methods of the structural school in applications of Artificial Intelligence allows to deal with aesthetic and historical-critical issues with greater documentation capability. In particular, the contribution concerns an actualisation of the axiology of spatial enhancement built by Jean Marie Floch assuming it as a fundamental semantic framework to construct an interior morphology valid in the various areas of interior design. Floch’s semiotic analysis allows us to better specify the notion of “environmental affordance” developed in James Gibson’s phenomenology of ecological perception. Following Gibson, the authors indicate an ‘environmental’ specification of the “affordances” and pose the question of their objectification and measurement. For the purpose of this objectification and measurement of environmental affordances, the contribution advances the hypothesis of using some Artificial Intelligence applications usually employed, nowadays, in the processing of large data sets of digital documents, to achieve creative, critical, historical-archival aims. In conclusion, the contribution outlines some fundamental conditions of possibility of such an objective measurement by describing some initial characteristics of an artificial system of recognition of morphological categories of interior spaces starting from huge data sets of documents.