Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
James J. Gibson's 1979 statement of ecological psychology, the book that gave psychology the word affordance. He argues perception is direct rather than a matter of the brain reconstructing a world from impoverished retinal images: the optic array, structured by surfaces and by the observer's own movement, already contains the information. Affordances are what the environment offers an animal that can use it. Foundational for design and robotics as much as for psychology.