CALL: The Development of Creative Life Theory (2020–2023, Part 6)

From Creative Action to Creative Course

This is part of a series of articles about my journey of developing Creative Life Theory from 2020 to 2023.

• Part 1: First-wave Development
• Part 2: Second-wave Development
• Part 3: Third-wave Development
• Part 4: Three Themes of a Journey of Theory Building
• Part 5: Creative Dialogue and Mental Moves
• Part 6: Four Perspectives and Creative Identities
• Part 7: The World of Works and Five Possible Books

I have developed a set of tools for Creative Life Theory. This article will use the “Kinds of Actors” framework to discuss the journey.

Contents

1. Kind of Actors

2. Four Perspectives

3. Four Creative Identities

3.1 Creative Actions and Creative Projects
3.2 Achieving Professional Achievements
3.3 Researching the theme of “Knowledge Center”
3.4 Curating Semiotic System Diagrams

4. The Microdynamics of Creative Identity

1. Kind of Actors

In Nov 2022, I worked on developing the Creative Life Curation framework. One piece of the framework is a distinction between Creators and Curators.

On Nov 14, 2022, I introduced a semiotic system diagram for the Creative Life Curation project. The core of the diagram is the following five units of analysis:

Based on the above five units of analysis, I developed a semiotic system diagram to represent the details of the Creative Life Curation framework.

The new semiotic system diagram was designed with the following basic structure.

The content of the diagram is formed with three parts:

• Subjectivity: Turning potential action opportunities into actual actions
• Subjectification: Turning the world into a person’s experience
• Objectification: Turning the person’s experience into artifacts for the world

The above discussion mentions five Units of Analysis. I also made a distinction between Creators and Curators. These two roles are assigned to different Units of Analysis.

• Creators: Creative Life (Action, Project)
• Curators: Creative Container (Journey, Landscape, Lifescope)

What does this distinction mean?

It means that “Action” and “Project” are related to Creators. These two Units of Analysis are necessary for Creators.

However, “Journey”, “Landscape”, and “Lifescope” are only useful to Curators, they are not necessary for Creators.

This distinction is inspired by sociologists’ distinction between Actors and Researchers. While Actors don’t need to consider producing scientific sociological knowledge, researchers have to do it.

The Creative Life Curation framework focuses on the Curativity of Life experience. All tools and methods are developed for professional curators who aim to 1) produce scientific knowledge for the public, and 2) help creators improve their creative actions.

We should notice that a creative person could be both a Creator and a Curator of her own creative actions. In this manner, she is running self-guided Creative Life Curation projects.

I also followed sociologists’ distinction between Actors and Researchers and developed a new typology of actors for the Creative Life Curation project.

The above diagram is based on a diagram called Universal Reference. The Vertical group refers to the Degrees of Abstraction of “Knowledge”.

I also used Kant’s Fractal Tree to develop a new version of the above diagram in order to visualize the implicit similarity explicitly. See the diagram below.

The above diagram displays four types of actors in a different visual layout. Now we can see the implicit similarity between Curators and Theoretical Sociologists.

I use “Linguistic Formism” as a label to describe Theoretical Sociologists, especially Lui’s approach. According to Lui,

First, every empirical sociology (observation, description, or narrative about the empirical) can always be summarized and transcribed formally and abstractly into a network of keywords, that is, its semiotic system, the language in which it can be spoken out.

Second, the semiotic system derived from a particular empirical sociology is always able to support innumerably many possible empirical sociologies besides the particular one from which it is derived. In other words, turning a particular empirical sociology into its semiotic system is a liberalizing act — liberalizing all the hemmed-in possibilities for yet-to-be-actualized empirical sociologies. It will be seen shortly that the great Saussurean idea of semiotic system bridges the huge gap between “theory about some specific thing” and “abstract Theory”. But both Hughes and Becker seem to have missed this most significant point, and I believe the whole sociological community also.

Source: Ingold’s Idea of Making — A View from Theoretical Sociology (Ping-keung Lui 2020, p.10)

Lui also uses “empirical sociology” to refer to “theory about some specific thing” and “theoretical sociology” to refer to “abstract theory”.

For the Creative Life Curation framework, Curators tend to use Units of Analysis to reflect on Actors’ life experiences. There is a “frame” behind each Unit of Analysis. Curators work with Actors’ life experiences and frames.

I use First-order Experience and Second-order Experience to describe two types of life experiences. While First-order Experience is directly given, it requires using Techniques to detective Second-order Experience.

Since Curators have to deal with Actors’ life experiences, their frames have to be suitable for sensemaking with actions and projects. So, I called it “Ecological Formism”.

The similarity between Curators and Theoretical Sociologists is “Formism” while their difference is between the Ecological approach and the Linguistic approach.

The above diagram also highlights the boundary between Culture and Science.

The goal of Creative Life Curation project is to turn a person’s creative actions into a social collective culture. I consider symbolic objectification as the final stage of this process. See the last row.

Name > Concept > Life Themes > Emerging Themes > Cultural Themes

In this way, we build an operational framework for understanding the chain of Creative Life Curation:

Affordance > Action > Experience > Theme > Culture

The above typology of actors highlights the significant meaning of Curators.

Curators are not scientists. Creative Life Curation needs both Creators and Curators.

You can find more details in Creative Life Curation: Kinds of Actors.

2. Four Perspectives

For the Creative Life Theory (v2.0), the above “Kind of Actors” framework offers us four perspectives:

• Theoretical Scientific Perspective (or Meta-theory perspective)
• Empirical Scientific Perspective (or Specific-theory perspective)
• Professional Perspective
• Ordinary Perspective

I also discovered a mental focus for each perspective:

• Theoretical Scientific Perspective -> Invariant Set
• Empirical Scientific Perspective -> Invariant
• Professional Perspective -> Quasi-invariant
• Ordinary Perspective -> Variant

The “Kind of Actors” framework was based on the “Universal Reference” framework. I also used the “Universal Reference” framework to develop the concept of “World of Activity”.

The above ideas encouraged me to make a distinction between “Universal Reference” and “World of Activity”. In order to open a new creative space for further discovery, I used a new term called “Meaning Matrix”.

In fact, the term “Meaning Maxtix” was inspired by what theoretical sociologist Thomas J. Fararo and his student John Skvoretz called “a hierarchical meaning control system” in an article titled Methods and Problems of Theoretical Integration and the Principle of Adaptively Rational Action (1993).

According to Fararo and Skvoretz, “Calling this a meaning control hierarchy is intended to emphasize that higher levels constitute commitments that ‘inform’ — enable and constrain — the lower level activities or discoveries.”

On Sept 21, 2023, I started using the term “Meaning Matrix” to name the diagram below.

The above diagram is not a simple “Universal Reference” diagram because I incorporate the “Kinds of Actors” framework and a sub-framework of “Ecological Formism” to discuss the concept of “Theme(Concept)”.

This is a fantastic theoretical insight because it could offer me a solution to curate my work on Curativity Theory, Activity Theory, and Mindset together!

You can find more related stories in The Concept of Mindset and Theoretical Integration, The Concept of “Activity” and Themes of Practice: Concept, Activity, and Cognition.

3. Four Creative Identities

From the above Meaning Matrix, I discover four creative life domains:

• Ordinary Perspective> Taking creative actions and working on creative projects
• Professional Perspective > Achieving professional achievements
• Empirical Scientific Perspective > Researching a theme of Creative Life Theory, such as “Knowledge Center”
• Theoretical Scientific Perspective > Curating the semiotic system diagram of Creative Life Theory

If we put these ideas together, we can see four Creative Identities. We see four types of different roles and jobs.

Can a person move between these creative life domains and shape her/his creative identity?

Let’s see some examples from my journey of developing Creative Life Theory.

3.1 Creative Actions and Creative Projects

In May 2020, I found an interesting video on my Linkedin homepage. The video has a brand name called BED Talks. Since I was familiar with TED Talks, I was curious about the idea of BED Talks. I searched and found more BED talk videos on Linkedin and figured out the story behind them.

Then, I designed the following picture for the BED Talks project.

This is a creative action.

I also used it as an example of Action-based Activity.

The Action-based Activity is a creative project.

You can find more details about the story in The NICE Way and Creative Actions.

3.2 Achieving Professional Achievements

In 2021, I worked on the D as Diagramming project which was both a research project and an experimental project. As an experimental project, I worked on three ideas:

• Introduced a set of Meta-diagrams I designed with real examples.
• Focused on turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge with diagrams
• In order to discover the relationship between diagrams and canvases, I turned my diagrams into canvases as experiments.

Since the notion of Meta-diagrams is really new, I had to coin some new terms to name emergent ideas during the process. Eventually, I realized that I should edit a new book to curate these new ideas together.

The final outcome was amazing! I edited a book (draft) titled Diagram Blending: Building Diagram Networks. It’s not a book about theory, but a new possible practice of diagramming: using meta-diagrams to build diagram networks.

In 2018, I wrote a 108-page thesis titled Diagram Explained. I developed a framework for understanding multiple layers of diagrams and wrote a list of topics about diagramming.

The thesis considers two groups of ideas. The first group is “meta-diagram, diagram, and diagram system” and the second group is “diagramming as an activity of knowing, theorizing and reflecting”.

The notion of “meta-diagram” considers a special type of diagram as an independent thing that doesn’t have to be a representation of an existing theory or model. For example, the 2x2 matrix diagram is a meta-diagram that doesn’t refer to any concrete theory or model such as BCG’s Growth-share matrix. A diagram system is a series of diagrams that share an intrinsic spatial logic and a visual identity.

The book only introduced a set of meta-diagrams I developed in the past several years as examples of the new practice.

You can find more details in Diagram Blending: Building Diagram Networks (Introduction).

I’d like to say this is a significant professional achievement in my career.

3.3 Researching the theme of “Knowledge Center”

I have mentioned the development of the concept of “Knowledge Center” in Part 5.

From the Empirical Scientific Perspective, I’d like to share more stories about it in this section.

My first empirical scientific research project about “Knowledge Center” is Ping-keung Lui’s Theoretical Sociology and The Trojan Society for Theoretical Sociology.

Ping-keung Lui is a theoretical sociological theorist. He was the Principal Lecturer (retired) at the Department of Applied Social Science at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University.

Lui aims to build a brand new theoretical sociology as a candidate for the paradigm of sociology. In 2007, Lui published a Chinese book titled Gaze, Action, and the Social World in which he presented his account of theoretical sociology.

He continuously developed his account of theoretical sociology with various activities such as writing books and papers, teaching courses, and curating academic discussions.

In 2009, he published in Chinese Cogito, fidimus et mysterium societatis, which is the first one in the other book project Essays in Social Phenomenology.

In the Fall of 2009, he taught a course titled The Philosopher and Sociology for MA students at Department of Philosophy, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. The following year, he continued the series of lectures and taught a course titled The Philosophers, the Sociologists, and the Scientific Project of Sociology.

In 2016, Lui registered the Trojan Society for Theoretical Sociology (TSTS) in Hong Kong. According to the profile of the society on Academia, it is “a voluntary, informal, non-partisan, non-affiliated and non-profit-making society of sociologists and anthropologists, most of who are currently working or studying in universities and research institutes in Hong Kong and mainland China. Its aim is to promote the study and research in theoretical sociology.”

From April 2022 to April 2023, I read Lui’s papers and books. We had email conversations and Wechat discussions. While learning ideas about sociological theories from Lui’s approach, I also considered his 15-year journey of developing a brand-new theoretical sociology as a case for the Slow Cognition project.

For example, I used the Thematic Landscape Map to visualize the landscape of Lui’s knowledge enterprise.

In April 2023, I developed the Creative Course framework and finished the Creative Life Theory (v2.0).

In May 2023, I started applying the Creative Life Theory (v2.0) to study Lui’s “Knowledge Center”.

From 2012 to 2016, Lui and several members hosted online discussions about theoretical sociology and related theoretical themes via email conversations and WeChat groups. The discussions have been edited and published in several volumes.

My new project focuses on these discussions. After reading the archive of their discussions, I used double activity circles to represent a typical pattern of the discussions.

I also used “Knowledge Circle” to name this new model.

You can find more details in Value Circle #2: Engaging with Lui’s Theoretical Sociology and Knowledge Engagement: The Expanded Creative Course Framework.

3.4 Curating Semiotic System Diagrams

If we follow Lui’s approach, the theoretical Scientific Perspective means curating a semiotic system diagram of a theory. For the Creative Life Theory, I worked on the following three semiotic system diagrams.

The first semiotic system diagram is about “Knowledge Center” and the “Building A Knowledge Enterprise” activity.

The second semiotic system diagram is about an overview of creative life.

The third semiotic system diagram is about Creative Life Curation. In fact, it is the extension of the third section of the above diagram.

You can find more details in Slow Cognition: Three Paths of Creative Life and A Semiotic System Diagram and A Semiotic System Diagram for Creative Life Curation.

4. The Microdynamics of Creative Identity

What about other theories and other knowledge enterprises?

Can a person move between these creative life domains and shape her/his creative identity?

You don’t have to do it.

However, I encourage you to have a big picture of this meaning matrix.

Sometimes, you could try one project to test a creative identity.

For example, I tried the creative identity of a “Theoretical Psychologist”.

On Sept 9, 2023, I applied some techniques I learned from Theoretical Sociologists to run a theoretical integration project about the concept of Mindset. You can find more details in Knowledge Engagement: The Concept of Mindset and Theoretical Integration.

The outcome is fantastic!

I made a Configurational Theory of Mindset and a new meta-framework called the Mental Tuning Framework. See the diagram below.

Am I a Theoretical Psychologist?

I just did an exercise of playing with some techniques of theoretical integration.

I learned these techniques from theoretical sociologists and applied them to a project about curating psychological theories.

On Sept 24, 2023, I used this story as an example to test the Persona Dynamics framework. You can find more details in Advanced Life Strategy: The Microdynamics of Creative Identity.

You could use the Persona—Activity Fit to discover your ideal creative identity.