Curativity Theory and The Ecological Practice Approach (v2, 2020)
A brief of Curativity Theory and the Ecological Practice Approach (v2, 2020)
From Sept 2018 to March 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice in order to reflect on one of my life themes: Curation. During the process of writing, I developed a new theoretical approach called the Ecological Practice Approach which aims to build an Affordance-based theory of action and apply ideas of ecological psychology for analyzing various social practices.
After March 2019, I continuously worked on revising Curativity and developing the Ecological Practice Approach as a new project. In July 2020, I wrote another 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.
Both two books were written in Chinese. In fact, they are still unpublished drafts. Curativity is a 615-page Google Doc file while After Affordance is a 372-page file.
This article aims to introduce the Ecological Practice approach which is a set of theoretical concepts (see the diagram below). Originally, I called it the Gibson — Lakoff — Schön approach. Later, I realized it can be seen as a new approach to practice studies. Thus…
