On making futures with human touch

Abstract

We commend Rietveld’s affordance-based approach to art and architecture for foregrounding an oft-neglected area in the cognitive sciences: the material dimension of human cognition, creativity and imagination. We suggest that supplementing the cross-disciplinary approach that Rietveld calls for with insights from archaeology and anthropology can not only help us create futures ‘with human touch’ but also gain a deeper understanding creativity more broadly.

If there is anything that archaeology has increasingly come to realise in the past few decades, it is that humans have always been a self-engineering kind. We are Homo faber not just because we are makers of things, but because in making them, we also make ourselves (Ihde & Malafouris, 2019; Malafouris, 2020b). From the earliest stone creations to the latest digital fabrications, we have been reconfiguring our cognitive ecologies and developmental pathways, changing our ways of thinking and being in the world. Coming from the perspective of art, philosophy and ecological-enactive cognitive science, Rietveld’s paper nicely captures the heart of this point. He shows how artworks, as material (re)configurations of spaces and things, can put forward tangible propositions for possible futures. These are futures ‘with human touch’ or, as Rietveld proposes at the start of his lecture, futures for which technologies are meaningful in a deeper sense.

Rietveld in this compelling piece gives the reader much to think about in terms of the meaning of making, the role of artistic practice and the recursive and dynamic interaction between materials and bodily practices. We particularly welcome the stress he places on the latter, and it is the importance of this material dimension of cognition that wish to underline here. Doubtless, much progress has been made in the philosophy of mind and the cognitive sciences in terms of bringing the mind out of the brain: embodied, enactive and ecological approaches (and the broader ‘4E’ paradigm) give us plenty of ways to think about the relationship between cognition and material culture in a manner that avoids neurocentrism (Newen et al., 2018). Unfortunately, what ‘things’ (broadly understood) do for the mind still remains vastly under-studied and under-theorised, even within these non-Cartesian frameworks (Malafouris, 2018).

Rietveld’s affordance-based exploration of art and architecture is a good example of the kind of approach that is needed to begin redressing this problem. Being sensitive to the practices and materials at hand allows his work to not only say something about the development of future technologies but also show that creativity and imagination do not simply happen ‘in the head’; rather, they are situated processes distributed across brains, bodies and things (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014; van Dijk & Rietveld, 2020). Rietveld touches on this notion in the context of ‘material playgrounds’, where artists are free to experiment with and explore the affordances of different materials. Indeed, is it not by thinking and feeling with and through things that we come closer to understanding our technical and creative mode of existence (Malafouris, 2014, 2019, 2020a)? Rietveld is right that artistic practice and processes of making are instances in which our awareness of materials and their potentialities is heightened. They open up room to be attentive to unexpected, new or indeed unconventional opportunities – both for the mind and the material – blurring the boundaries between human imagining and material affordance. Expressed in the language of Material Engagement Theory, we can see this as a form of material imagination, a process where the present and absent, the actual and the possible are experienced together (Koukouti & Malafouris, 2020, 2021). Much like Rietveld’s work, this notion aims to capture the inseparability of acts of imagining from the socio-material ecologies in which they occur. It is being attentive to how different ways of creative thinking unfold in actual situations – as Rietveld does – that will enable us to overcome unhelpful dualisms (e.g., mental and material, ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ order thinking) and better appreciate creative imagination as a situated phenomenon.

We agree that collaboration between makers, philosophers and cognitive scientists is needed to understand how we may support novel and more sustainable ways of touching the world. To this, we add that archaeology and anthropology are needed too. Both contribute further depth to the exploration of making, what it means, what it affords, how it changes. Artistic experimentation and craft-based anthropological research, for example, provide a space where varieties of material imagination can grow, helping us rediscover our ability to take pleasure in ‘joining forces’ with materials as Rietveld suggests at the end of his lecture (see also Ingold, 2013). Cognitive archaeology and anthropology can also add temporal depth and provide a solid processual basis to the study of how the affordances of creative material engagements unfold and vary across contexts and timescales. More broadly, such collaboration has the potential to further expand the scope of Rietveld’s research into a deeper, cross-disciplinary quest into the technical modes of human becoming, past, present and future.