The Role of Affordance Landscapes in Exaptive Innovations

Abstract

A significant part of the current literature considers the representational abilities as the core ingredient of decision-making about innovation. In this chapter, we explore a different type of hypothesis based on the concept of affordance landscape, emphasizing the ability of living beings to prefigure landscapes of potential affordances in order to reach specific goals. The notion of affordance landscape helps us to shed light on the ability of living beings to reconceive, through top-down processes, the existing affordances to discover new uses of artifacts.