Mapping Thematic Space #4: The “Center” Thematic Space

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CALL4

18 min readFeb 12, 2022

How to start a thematic space from scratch?

This article is part of the Slow Cognition project and its focus is Thematic Space and Developing Tacit Knowledge. I have introduced the concept of Thematic Space and discussed related ideas in the following articles:

I have mentioned the notion of “Knowledge Center” in Thematic Space: The Art of Continuous Discovery on Jan 17, 2022. This notion is a brand new concept for me.

Since I considered the concept of “Knowledge Center” with the Activity Analysis project, I started a new thematic space about “Knowledge Center”.

Today, I’d like to use the “Knowledge Center” as an example to discuss building a thematic space from scratch.

The Future of Activity Analysis

The concept of “Knowledge Center” was born from a talk about Activity Theory and the Activity Analysis project.

On Jan 2, 2022, I had a 71-minute talk with a friend of mine. He is an active curator of early local TEDx events in China. In recent years, he also curated local Design Sprint events in China. In addition, he often curates innovation workshops for local communities.

I briefly introduced the development of my personal studio CALL in the past year. Before the talk, he has read the article CALL: Annual Review (2020–2021). The major part of our talk focused on my works on Activity Theory. As mentioned in the article, I completed the Activity U project (phase I) with three books in 2021:

I also introduced the theoretical concepts and methodological methods of Activity Theory.

At the end of the talk, we chatted about the future of CALL in 2022. I mentioned the Activity Analysis project. I told him that I’d like to run it as a Knowledge Center.

The notion of Knowledge Center is a new spark for me. I didn’t use the term to describe the Activity Analysis project before the talk. As a new spark, it emerged from a conversation.

On Jan 13, I designed the diagram below to visualize what I talked about the notion of Knowledge Center with my friend on Jan 2.

The above diagram describes an imagined project with a new concept.

An imagined project: the Activity Analysis project
A new concept: Knowledge Center

Now, the Activity Analysis project is a website that refers to my “Activity” thematic space. The website is just about an idea that belongs to an individual mind.

In the next phase, the Activity Analysis project is expected to grow as a knowledge center as a collective project. That means it is not my personal idea, but it should be a concept shared by a group of people who are passionate about adopting the “Activity” thematic space for their epistemic development. Also, they would like to contribute to the development of the collective “Activity” thematic space.

Phase 3 is building a Knowledge Community. The difference between Knowledge Center and Knowledge Community is Scope and Scale. A knowledge center may only have less than 15 members while a knowledge community may have thousands of members.

The three-phase development is inspired by Project-oriented Activity Theory.

I used the above diagram to explain the concept of “culture” from the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory. It zooms out to a large view that connects the Individual mind (Idea) and Collective theme (Zeitgeist) through Collective Projects (Concept).

Not all ideas lead to a real concept which means a social practice from the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory. Though Blunden’s approach focuses on “the formation of a project with a concept of the problem is an original and creative social act”, I think the non-problem idea could develop into a real concept too. Cultural Innovations can be driven by problem-solution ideas and play-for-fun ideas too.

I personally believe that the journey of epistemic development is for fun first and for labor second. Why? You don’t have to continuously develop your mind in order to master some work-related activities.

The above diagram also mentions three knowledge frameworks I am working on:

Each knowledge framework could be adopted to support one phase of the Activity Analysis project.

The Knowledge Curation framework is for the development of “Activity” thematic space (phase 1).
The Project Engagement framework is for the development of “Activity” knowledge center (phase 2).
The Platform for Development framework is for the development of “Activity” knowledge community (phase 3).

From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, there is a new Concept called Knowledge Center behind the Activity Analysis project. It means that the Activity Analysis project is the demo of the concept of “Knowledge Center”.

I have mentioned other thematic spaces such as “relevance” thematic space and “opportunity” thematic space. The notion of “Thematic Space — Knowledge Center — Knowledge Community” could be applied to other thematic spaces too.

The concept of “Knowledge Center” places the Activity Analysis project in a larger master project: building more than one knowledge center.

What’s a “Center”?

The “Knowledge Center” thematic space appeared with an abstract question:

What’s a “Center”?

The term “Knowledge Center” refers to a Double-theme theme. For me, it means a center for developing a certain knowledge. For the Activity Analysis project, certain knowledge refers to Activity Theory and other Social Practice theories.

Why do we need such a center?

What’s a center?

I had a rough answer to the question. A “center” should have its own uniqueness in order to establish its identity and theme. Otherwise, there is no need to build a “center”.

Center, Content, and Context

On Aug 31, 2021, I used “center”, “content” and “context” to name a nested meta-diagram for discussing complexity and performance in D as Diagramming: The iART Diagram Network.

For example, the startup system can be understood as the three levels:

Center: Founder
Content: Startup
Context: Investor

From the perspective of career, the founder’s career can be understood as the following three levels:

Center: person’s purpose and experience
Content: the startup activity (object and objective)
Context: domain (impact and reward)

We can also highlight three concepts from the iART framework and turn them into a nested level:

Center: Performance
Content: Complexity
Context: Anticipation

For meta-diagrams, words are just placeholders. So, I didn’t pay attention to “Center”, “Content”, and “Context”. For me, it is fine to use X, Y, and Z too.

Now we can reflect on these three words. The word “Center” refers to something which is the basis.

Center and Wholeness

One day I noticed that there is a book about Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Theory on my bookshelf. I suddenly realized that “Center” is a core concept of Alexander’s theory.

The book is titled Pattern Theory: Introduction and Perspectives on the Tracks of Christopher Alexander. It was written by Helmut Leitner who is a fan of Christopher Alexander’s ideas. Leitner was motivated by his experience as a software engineer and by reading about Software Design Patterns. In 2007, he wrote the book in German. Later, the book was translated to English and published in 2015.

I’d like to quote some words from Leitner’s book for the present discussion.

Each systems theory needs a term to describe the abstract system elements. Many theorists use the word element for this purpose, while others use the word object. Alexander, who focuses on material and spatial structures, uses the term center. The concept stands for structural elements: concrete, recognizable, spatial structures or regions (2015, p.29).
A center is always the center of something, a part of a larger system, and the basis for some dynamic exchange. At least, we imagine this on the basis of our everyday language: we expect that a center has to do with activities and exchange. This way, each center has a meaning and a reason to exist. In addition, a center could not serve a function if it could not also have an internal structure based on its meaning (2015, p.29).
Centers are always centers because they play a role in a larger structure or the configuration of a unit. A house is a center in the larger wholeness or totality of a city. This totality cannot be separated into parts without losing major aspects of it. Each whole is in turn part of a larger whole, from our planet Earth as an organic whole to the universe as the all-encompassing whole (2015, p.30).
A whole exists as a functional unit before the centers which are created to exist within it (2015, p.30).
Each whole consists of centers. According to Alexander, life develops this way: centers are the structural building blocks of wholeness in space. These centers contain smaller centers and may also be parts of larger centers. Centers support each other in their geometrical and functional relationships and are living structures corresponding to their density and intensity (2015, p.32).

The author also shares the following diagrams for describing the latent structural elements existing around a single point on a sheet of paper.

Source: *Pattern Theory: Introduction and Perspectives on the Tracks of Christopher Alexander* (2015, p.33).

According to the author, “A single point on a sheet is connected to quite a number of structure elements, for example, the sheet; the point; the halo surrounding the point; the rectangles that come into existence by perceiving the point as separating the sheet into an upper, lower, right and left half; the four diagonals; the four quarters of the sheet and the white zones that separate them, starting from the halo of the point…” (2015, p.33)

Quite interesting!

The author also introduces 15 properties of Pattern Theory. Property 2 is Strong Center (p.37).

Many structures have recognizable, strong centers. According to Alexander, strong centers occur primarily within wholes which are strong centers in themselves.
This property is also often connected with local symmetry. Many strong centers have a pronounced inner structure, many are connected to important processes.
Imagine the nucleus of a biological cell that provides the genetic information for the production of the proteins that are needed by the cell.
Although physics knows about forces of spherical symmetry and chemical substances — there is no general explanation given by natural sciences why such centers exist at all.

Source: *Pattern Theory: Introduction and Perspectives on the Tracks of Christopher Alexander* (2015, p.150).

To be honest, I did not read Christopher Alexander’s books. As mentioned by the author, “Consisting of more than 4,000 pages, the original texts (Alexander, 1964–2005) are not easy to cope with, largely due to their cost and sheer volume. In addition, Alexander wrote his 13 books across several decades of research work, during which time his concepts evolved. This means that his early and later texts are not always consistent in their wording, a situation which had improved by the time Alexander published his principal work, the four volumes of The Nature of Order (Alexander, 2002- 2005)”.

One reason I didn’t read Christopher Alexander’s books is that one friend of mine read these books.

I have a friend…

Leon Liu is a software engineer and an independent researcher of self-directed education and open-source learning theories and practice. He has been reading Alexander’s books for many years. Several years ago, he started adopting “Life Center” which is a core concept of Alexander’s ideas to develop a new approach to learning.

The approach is named Life Framework Theory. You can find more details about the approach in the following post on Linkedin.

Leon (Yuanliang) Liu on LinkedIn: Life Framework Theory to deal with all complex systems

If you understand life centers around you, you can understand more of yourself as a life center. If you understand more…

www.linkedin.com

The post shares a 202-page file about Life Framework Theory. He uses the teapot as an example to describe the concept of Life Center. See the picture below, there are four Life Centers there!

According to Leon, “Different teapots, sharing the same life centers, having the same model”.

Two years ago, I had a talk with Leon on the phone. The talk is a rough dialogue between Christopher Alexander’s pattern theory and James J. Gibson’s affordance theory. Leon introduced the basic idea of the concept of Life Center and I realized that each Life Center could be understood as a set of Affordances.

Gibson used the term “niche” to describe “a set of Affordances.” The term “niche” is originally from ecology, Gibson redefines it from the perspective of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, “Ecologists have the concept of a niche. A species of animal is said to utilize or occupy a certain niche in the environment. This is not quite the same as the habitat of the species; a niche refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. I suggest that a niche is a set of affordances. The natural environment offers many ways of life, and different animals have different ways of life. The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche. Note the complementarity of the two. But note also that the environment as a whole with its unlimited possibilities existed prior to animals. The physical, chemical, meteorological, and geological conditions of the surface of the earth and the pre-existence of plant life are what make animal life possible. They had to be invariant for animals to evolve.” (1979/2015, pp.120–121)

You can find more details about “niche” from Thematic Space: Some Sparks for the “Infoniche” thematic space.

Genidentity

Several days ago, Leon shared a new article about Life Framework and Education Innovation on Wechat. I made a short comment and mentioned the concept of “Genidentity”.

What’s Genidentity? Let’s quote a short piece from Wikipedia:

As introduced by Kurt Lewin, genidentity is an existential relationship underlying the genesis of an object from one moment to the next.
What we usually consider to be an object really consists of multiple entities, which are the phases of the object at various times. Two objects are not identical because they have the same properties in common, but because one has developed from the other.
Lewin introduced the concept in his 1922 Habilitationsschrift Der Begriff der Genese in Physik, Biologie und Entwicklungsgeschichte. It is today perhaps the only surviving evidence of Lewin’s influence on the philosophy of science. However, this concept never became an object of widespread discussion and debate in its own terms. Rather, it was extracted from its context by philosophers such as Rudolf Carnap, Hans Hermes, Hans Reichenbach, Adolph Grünbaum, and Bas van Fraassen who incorporated this concept into their own theories such as the topology of the universe or the axiomatization of mechanics.
Lewin’s idea was to compare and contrast the concept of genidentity in various branches of science, thereby laying bare the characteristic structure of each and making their classification possible in the first place.

In 2017, I adopted the concept of “Genidentity” to discuss “the Life of Artifacts” in a private file named Activity as Container which is an early version of the Ecological Practice approach.

In Feb 2020, I wrote a 160-page private document titled Life Theory which is both a theoretical plan and a toolkit. As a theoretical play, it describes the position and the direction of expanding the Ecological Practice approach to a social theory. As a toolkit, it curates six frameworks together. It is the beta version of the Ecological Practice approach.

In Life Theory, I considered the concept of “Genidentity” as an important concept for the Ecological Practice approach?

Why? See the diagram below which is the basic model of the Ecological Practice approach.

The Ecological Practice Approach considers the world as a nested container system. Things move between different containers. For a particular thing, its trajectory is called “Lifeflow”. There is a theoretical issue with Lifeflow:

How can a thing keep its uniqueness over time?

Kurt Lewin’s concept of Genidentity is perfect to answer this question. Though Genidentity is originally for discussing the difference between various branches of science and their dynamic development, it is about a “topology of identity” from my perspective.

Later, I developed an operational definition for the concept of Genidentity: A thing’s Genidentity is defined by Essential Differences with Situated Dynamics. In this way, we turn a philosophical concept into a practical concept for empirical research.

What’s the relationship between Genidentity and Life Center? I roughly thought that each Life Center requires uniqueness and Genidentity is about uniqueness too. While Life Center is more about spatial structures, Genidentity is more about temporal dynamics.

Tiny World

Yesterday I shared Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca’s book Innovating Emergent Futures on Linkedin. They suggest that Creativity is Worldmaking. See the diagram below.

Disruptive forms of change are categorically different from developmental change. While we experience and participate in developmental changes continuously, we have far less experience with disruptive change. And it is quite common to consider disruptive change simply a bigger, stronger and more radical version of developmental change. So often disruptive change is imaged as an extreme form of creativity where one simply breaks all the rules or just does crazy things — but disruptive change has a clear logic and process that can be understood and followed. (p.117)

What I am doing echoes what they are saying. I think I am making some Tiny Worlds. Meta-diagram refers to a Tiny World that creates a new layer of diagramming practice. Thematic Space refers to a Tiny World that turns a messy thing from invisible into visible.

The notion of “Tiny World” echoes the concept of “Life Center” and the concept of “Genidentity” too.

Platform Genidentity

In 2019, I worked on the early version of Platform Ecology. I applied the concept of Genidentity to study digital platform design and development.

Then I coined a new concept: Platform Genidentity.

What’s Platform Genidentity? I use two concepts to define it:

Platform Core: a basic unit of a platform. For example, a Tweet, a YouTube video page, a Q&A page on Quora, etc.
Platform-ba: a platform-based sociocultural field. For example, YouTube-ba is a YouTube-based sociocultural space. You can find more details here.

As mentioned above, we have an operational definition of the concept of Genidentity: A thing’s Genidentity is defined by Essential Differences with Situated Dynamics.

For Platform Ecology, we need to discover the sources of Essential Differences and Situated Dynamics. I think the sources are Platform Core and Platform-ba. However, they don’t work as a one-to-one mapping relationship. I want to claim the following model:

I didn’t publicly talk about the idea of Platform Genidentity because I focused on Platform for Development which is based on individual perspectives.

The Degree of Uniqueness

Now we should return to the notion of “Knowledge Center”. One thing we can learn from the above discussion is Uniqueness.

As mentioned above, the term “Knowledge Center” refers to a Double-theme theme. For me, it means a center for developing a certain knowledge.

Now, we should require a degree of uniqueness for certain knowledge. For a high degree of uniqueness, we can look at the following examples:

The above examples refer to several unique and well-known theoretical approaches in their fields. In order to understand the diversity of uniqueness, I adopt the Four C model of creativity study for the present discussion.

There are other traditional pair ideas called “Big-C” and “little-c” in the field of creativity research. “Big-C creativity” refers to what people call “Genius” who create famous creative achievements such as music, paints, inventions, theories, etc. On the other hand, “little-c creativity” pays attention to creative behavior in everyday life. For example, making waffle art, using cardboard boxes for sliding, decorating a place for a birthday party, etc.

One, Two, Three… Two is always not enough for understanding a complex thing. In 2009, James C. Kaufman and Ronald A. Beghetto proposed two additional categories: “Pro-c” and “mini-c” (Kaufman & Beghetto, 2009). Now, we have the following Four-C model of creativity.

The Four C model of Creativity (Kaufman and Beghetto, 2009)

Beghetto and Kaufman defined the Mini-c as the novel and personally meaningful interpretation of experience, actions, and events. Since we have the little-c idea, why do we need a similar concept? Researchers argued there is a gap between creative insights and experiences in the learning context and little-c situation. For example, a child who learns how to draw 3D shapes in his art class and uses the skill to create drawings of buildings in new ways or a student who discovers that he can use his love of history books to improve her vocabulary on tests. The most important point of Mini-c creativity is it focuses on the process without outside judgment. We can put Mini-c into the firstness category because it does not need to be shared or acknowledged by anyone but the creator.

The aim of “Pro-c” is to give credit to “amateur” creators and professional creators who are successful but have not reached a level of prominence as eminent creators achieved. This category is a wide spectrum. On the one hand, most professional workers can be classified as Pro-c. On the other hand, we see many “amateur” creators have the potential to be more creative than some of their “professional” counterparts. We should give these “amateur” creators credit based on their products and not judge them by their main source of income.

The Four C model is not a simple typology of creativity. Instead, Beghetto and Kaufman offered a framework for conceptualizing and classifying various levels of creative expression and pointed to potential paths of creative maturation. The above diagram presents detailed relations between different development levels. Beghetto and Kaufman described a creative landscape of daily life: “As part of this process of enjoying creativity in everyday life, the creator may stumble upon the domain that he or she feels an initial pull of passion. With years of acquired expertise and advanced schooling, the creator may move onto the stage of Pro-c. Although he or she will still have mini-c insights, the creator has now achieved professional-level status and is capable of working on problems, projects, and ideas that affect the field as a whole. The creator may continue to create at the Pro-c level throughout her or his entire life, with specific peaks occurring at different ages based on the domain. After many years have come and gone, the creator may achieve a lasting Big-C contribution to a field or the creator may have passed away, and history will make the final judgment as to whether he or she has entered the pantheon of Big-C or is long-forgotten.”

We can apply the model to discuss the degree of uniqueness of “Knowledge Center” too.

A related issue is the degree of influence of the “Knowledge Center”. However, I consider “Knowledge Center” as a small-scale level. If a “Knowledge Center” establishes a high degree of influence, it becomes a “Knowledge Community”. In other words, “Knowledge Center” is the seed stage of “Knowledge Community”.

Reflection

The above ideas are pieces about the theme “Center”, now we can put them on the Thematic Space canvas. See the diagram below.

The above diagram uses Blue dots and Green dots. What do these colors mean?

Blue dots: native members of a thematic space.
Green dots: relative members of a thematic space.

We can also use the “Host-Guest” metaphor or similar metaphors to describe their relationships. The “Center” thematic space is the Home of blue dots, but it is the Visiting field of green dots because they belong to other thematic spaces.

The inner space is about my personal experiences. We see three dots:

Knowledge Center: this is my present focus.
The Activity Analysis Project: this is my present focus.
The Platform Ecology Project: this is my future focus.

Outer space is about outside resources. I consider my own books (drafts) as outside resources too. Now we see five native members:

Life Center
Genidentity
Pattern Theory
Platform Genidentity
Life Framework Theory

We can also find seven relative members:

Ecological Niche
Worldmaking
Tiny World
Project-oriented Activity Theory
Project Engagement
Platform for Development
Four C Model of Creativity

We can also check the types of Sparks. As mentioned before, I defined the following four types of knowledge sparks:

Imagery (Mental Imagination)
Semantics (Cultural Meme)
Narrative (Communicative Scene)
Affordance (Material Interaction)

The above discussion quoted the diagram about “a single point on a sheet”. This is Imagery.

My notion of Platform Genidentity was inspired by Lewin’s concept of Genidentity. This is Semantics (Cultural Meme).

My friend told me about the concept of Life Center and related ideas. This is a Narrative (Communicative Scene)

My friend used teapots and pictures to describe the concept of Life Center. This is Affordance (Material Interaction).

This article also points out a pair of new concepts about thematic spaces:

Present Focus
Future Focus

Since a thematic space is a large cognitive container, we don’t have to deal with all information about one particular theme at a particular time. For example, my present focus is on “Knowledge Center”. I can put some related ideas in the “Center” thematic space in order to develop my Tacit Knowledge about “Knowledge Center”.

A by-product of mapping thematic space is discovering future focus. For example, this time I find the Platform Ecology project and Platform Genidentity should be my future focus.

You are most welcome to connect via the following social platforms:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverding
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Mapping Thematic Space #4: The “Center” Thematic Space

The Future of Activity Analysis

What’s a “Center”?

Center, Content, and Context

Center and Wholeness

I have a friend…

Leon (Yuanliang) Liu on LinkedIn: Life Framework Theory to deal with all complex systems

If you understand life centers around you, you can understand more of yourself as a life center. If you understand more…

Genidentity

Tiny World

Platform Genidentity

The Degree of Uniqueness

Reflection

Written by Oliver Ding