Exploration driven behaviors: A contrubiton to the theory of affordance

Background/ Architectural practice strives for organizing human experience even in a disputatious way by blending the technique of creating space with psychological, physiological and phenomenological emphasis. It is possible to examine this organization with the concept of affordance defined by James Gibson that is used by psychology in the studies of visual perception. Affordances are the good or bad information that the physical environment offers or provides for the living creatures actions. In an ecological perspective, the affordances of the physical object and environment are directly (without a cognitive process) perceived and it contains the information that restricts and directs the behaviors of the organism. In natural environment, living creature accesses the affordance information by the sensation skills functioned by its phylogenetic gains and performs its behavior according to the accessed information. The roles of Mirror neurons on behaviours discovered in the neurophysiologic experiments open a platform to discuss Gibson's affordance theory in a broader manner. Mirror neurons are triggered when one observe the others' behaviours executed by using tool(s) and observed movement is recorded as neural pattern by those neurons. While observer interact with observed tool, obtained neural pattern leads observer autonomically execute recorded behaviours. For that reason, the way of how one perceives affordances indicated the possible behaviours and perceived directly is not only depend the sensorimotor (phylogenetic character) but also socio-cultural setup (ontogenetic character). Problem/ However, designed action in the sensor based interactive setup (SBIS), can be executed by body movements which have no sensible and observable contact with physical objects. So, how the behaviours of others in the SBIS, which makes an action possible that cannot be executed in the natural environment, are copied by mirror neurons and how the neural pattern obtained by copying mechanism can shape behaviours of observer tried to execute same action, are questionable. Within the scope of study, an experiment-game designed at SBIS, which no physical object is allowed to be used. In the game, test subjects observed behaviors of author for the first time and try successfully to execute these behaviours to be winner. Users do not need to interact with sociocultural affordances ,which are the physical structure of designed object, to execute an action. In the scope of this thesis it was claimed that when the restrictive and directive information of sosyocultural affordance is eliminated, users can externalise implicit and /or exploration driven behaviours