What will you do with me, even if you don't see me? Affordances and the Night of Culture

Abstract

The organization of the cyclical open-air festival Night of Culture in Lublin in cooperation with a research group works on two levels. The first is the level of an offer of experiences and reflections for the audience of the Night of Culture. The second is the level of research – social and other – on the design, implementation and effects of the first level. On both levels, a phenomenon plays an important role that can be described from the perspective of cognitive ecology with the term "affordance." A systematic analysis of this can lead to the third level: a meta-analysis of the street festival under discussion. I will not undertake such a complex task in this text, which is partly a review and then a "report", but I will make a brief reconstruction of the conceptual and design work related to the Affordances Activity, in which I participated significantly and regularly, as well as will consider the stage of the production of designed objects and their subsequent operation during this year's (2023) edition of the Night of Culture, in which a group of volunteers (students of the Maria Curie-Sklodowska University) played an important role. Remarks of the aforementioned meta-research dimension of the project constitute a wide margin of the article.