The Attachance Framework (2018) and Thematic Engagement
Attach, Detach, and Moves between Thematic Spaces
This article introduces the Attachance Framework and a new project: Thematic Engagement.
1. A brief of Attachance
I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 in order to discuss some ideas related to the concept of Affordance which is a core idea of Ecological Psychology.
Affordance means potential action opportunities offered by environments. I want to highlight the meaning and value of actual action itself, however, the term Affordance only refers to potential actions. Thus, I coined the term Attachance to emphasize the potential opportunities offered by actual actions, especially the attaching act and the detaching act.
In 2019, I started working on my own theoretical account of the Ecological Practice approach after finishing a book titled Curativity. The 2019 version of the approach is a curated toolkit version. The concept of Attachance is part of the toolkit. In May 2020, I wrote a book titled After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for expanding ecological psychology to the modern digital environment. The primary theme of After Affordance is the concept of Attachance.
The concept of Attachance is planned to develop as 1) an ecological practice concept for practice studies such as interaction design and startup innovation, and 2) a philosophical concept for developing a social theory.
The book After Affordance only achieves the first goal and it focuses on the following acts:
- Attaching to an environment
- Detaching from an environment
- Attaching to an object
- Detaching from an object
I use the concept of Attachance in many ways.
The Attachance Perspective refers to its philosophical meaning. You can find more details in D as Diagramming: The Attachance Perspective.
The theoretical concept of “Attachance” for the Ecological Practice Approach. It refers to what I explored in the 2020 book After Affordance. For example, I used it and Affordance together for discussing creative actions. You can find more details in Creative Actions: Second-order Affordance and Attachance.
The word “Attachance” for normal discussions. I often discuss some stories or topics from the perspective of Attachance. You can find an example in Possible Practices: Attach, Detach, and Opportunities.
This article aims to introduce a framework for understanding Attachance.
2. The Ecological Transformation Framework
In July 2018, I made the following diagram which is part of a framework called Ecological Transformation. Last month I renamed it the Attachance Framework.
My primary theoretical work is called the Ecological Practice Approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and social practice theories in general. Since the concept of Attachance is a core concept of the Ecological Practice Approach, the Attachance framework is a sub-framework of the approach.
In 2018, I used the diagram below as the basic model of the Ecological Practice Approach.
In 2020, I used a new version of the above diagram in the book After Affordance. I used “Container” to replace “Environment”. The concept of “Container” has been introduced in my 2019 book Curativity. The word “Forces” was changed to “Offers” which led to one chapter about action opportunities in After Affordance.
Finally, the pair of concepts of “Enter — Exit” was considered a concrete phenomenon of the concept of Attachance. Thus, I decided to use “Attach” and “Detach” for the basic model. In After Affordance, I spent three chapters discussing the concept of Attachance and the “Affordance — Attachance” relationship.
The Ecological Transformation Framework was developed in 2018. Its original purpose was to develop a framework for reflecting on my work experience in Interaction Design.
The Ecological Practice Approach was born in 2019. It aims to establish a new theoretical account that is based on ecological psychology.
These two projects share some ideas because my primary theoretical approach is inspired by ecological psychology and similar theoretical resources.
3. Long-term Relations as Distributed Acts
The Attachance framework starts from a simple idea: Attaching Act, Detaching Act, and Ecological Values and Meaning of these two types of Acts.
It focuses on the “Subject-Object” relationship. For example, a person and a material object. However, I think it from the following notion.
The above basic model leads to the following notion.
Finally, I reach the Attachance framework. See the diagram below. Based on the above model, I identified 9 types of Attachances. See the red words and red lines.
Each red line refers to an Attach/Detach act between two containers. Each red line means a type of Attachance.
Each type of Attachance has its own specific settings of time and space. For example, Move means there is a distance (space) between Non-Act and Before-Act, and there is no previous (time) interaction between Subject and Object.
I used “Far — Near — With — Near — Far” as the spatial structure to develop the framework. The structure also corresponds to three types of experience.
- Far > There > Non-Experience
- Near > Here > Quasi-Experience
- With > Here > Real-Experience
The term “Experience” refers to interaction-based experience. If a Subject is far from an Object, the spatial distance between these two determines the experience: there are no action opportunities there. I call this type of experience Non-Experience.
4. William James’ Legacy
The Attachance framework for “attach” and “detach” is inspired by William James’ relation theory.
As Harry Heft pointed out in his book Ecological Psychology in Context, William James’ Radical Empiricism can be seen as a philosophical foundation of Gibson’s Ecological Psychology.
William James described several types of relations in Essays in Radical Empiricism:
- conterminousness (things with but one thing between)
- contiguousness (nothing between)
- likeness
- nearness
- simultaneousness
- in-ness
- on-ness
- for-ness
- with-ness
- and-ness
Inspired by this relation theory, I used the “Far — Near — With — Near — Far” spatial structure as the basic model of the Attachance framework. Though my framework is not an application of William James’ relation theory, it is inspired by his basic framework. For example, my term “Near” is inspired by “Nearness” while the term “With” is inspired by “Withness”.
In fact, if we need an advanced version of the Attachance framework, we can directly apply William James’s relation theory to develop a new version.
5. Thematic Engagement
As mentioned above, I developed the Ecological Transformation Framework for reflecting on Interaction Design. So, I use the “person—material objects” relationship for the framework. I did several case studies.
However, I consider the Attachance Framework to be an abstract framework for discussing various types of Ecological Relations.
Can we use it for understanding the “Person — Theme” interaction?
Of course!
We can consider “Theme” as a specific type of Object. Since it is not a Material Object, it brings some new challenges to us.
In the past several months, I worked on the Project Engagement approach (v2.1) which emphasizes the notion of “Moving between Thematic Spaces”.
I have used the “Project Network” model to explore the idea of “Moving between Thematic Spaces”.
The model of “Project Network” is a multiple-level network that considers 1) a network of Themes, 2) a network of Projects, and 3) a network of People.
- All theoretical approaches and frameworks belong to the network of themes.
- All real activities such as developing a toolkit, designing a canvas, and hosting a program, are part of a network of projects.
- All things about people’s biogeography are located in the network of People.
The diagram below is a map of the archive of my six-month journey in developing the Life-as-Project approach. All theoretical approaches and frameworks belong to the network of themes. Each Theme refers to a Thematic Space. You can find more details in Life Strategy: Moving between Thematic Spaces.
The “Project Network” model is great for discussing multiple themes and related activities.
Now let’s use a short-term “Thematic Engagement” to refer to the notion of “Moving between Thematic Spaces” and the “People — Theme” relationship in general.
What’s the relationship between “Project Engagement” and “Thematic Engagement”? Why do I coin a new term again?
The Project Engagement Approach (v2.1) was introduced on August 2, 2022. Now I am moving from theoretical development to practical applications.
The Project Engagement approach follows Andy Blunden’s approach to an interdisciplinary theory of activity. His version considers “Activity as Formation of Concepts” and this process is a “Project”. I wrote a book titled Project-oriented Activity Theory in 2020/2021. The second part of the book is named Project Engagement. I used it to refer to several modules I developed for applying Andy Blunden’s approach to the practical level.
I also developed a concept called “Themes of Practice” for my own approach called the Ecological Practice approach before 2020. Later, I found Andy Blunden’s notion of “Activity as Formation of Concepts” echoes “Themes of Practice”.
It also has the following slogan:
Life = Projects = Thematic Spaces = Events = History
Eventually, I developed a series of tools and methods for qualitative data analysis.
I also slowly moved to real applications of the Project Engagement approach in August 2022.
I selected Knowledge Creators as the target audience because my approach considers “Activity=Concept/Theme=Project”. Since Knowledge Creators’ products are Knowledge that can be understood as themes and concepts, it is perfect to apply the approach to research Knowledge Creators’ creative work and life.
I called this application “Thematic Engagement”. For example, my own creative life’s primary theme is the concept of “Curativity”. It connects to several secondary themes such as Affordance (Ecological Psychology), Activity (Activity Theory), Anticipation (Anticipatory Systems Theory), Concept, and Diagram.
On Sept 2, 2022, I developed a method called “Mapping Thematic Landscape” and used my “Curativity” thematic landscape as an example. See the diagram below.
You can find more details in Slow Cognition: Mapping Thematic Landscape (Curativity, 2019–2022).
While Thematic Space refers to a small scale, Thematic Landscape is a group of Thematic Spaces. While Thematic Space Canvas focuses on developing Tacit knowledge, Thematic Landscape Map is more about activities around knowledge themes.
So far, I have developed three methods for understanding Thematic Engagement
- Mapping Thematic Space with Thematic Space Canvas
- Mapping Thematic Space with the Project Network model
- Mapping Thematic Landscape with the Thematic Landscape Map
How about one theme?
We can use the Attachance framework to deal with the simple version of the “Person — Theme” relationship.
This will lead to the fourth method for the Thematic Engagement project.
