Thematic Space: Some Sparks for the “Infoniche” thematic space

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14 min readFeb 6, 2022

Information, Places, and Actions

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:

This article aims to introduce my “Infoniche” thematic space and share some Sparks for the thematic space.

Part 1: Background

This part offers some background information about my “Infoniche” thematic space. You can skip it and jump to Part 2 and return to here.

1.1 The “Infoniche” Thematic Space

Readers may know I have been working on the Ecological Practice approach since March 2019 when I finished the draft of Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice.The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology, Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings Theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, and social practice theories. There are two goals behind the Ecological Practice approach:

1) Expanding Ecological Psychology from native natural environment to modern digital environment.
2) Expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis.

During May 2020, I wrote the draft of After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for the above tasks. I spent one chapter introducing the Infoniche framework. After reviewing Gibson’s idea Niche, Barker’s idea Behavior Settings, and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems, I coined a new term Infoniche and developed an analysis framework for understanding ecological niches in the information age.

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)

Following Gibson’s definition of niche, I coined a new term Infoniche which is defined as a set of potential action possibilities such as affordances and supportances. The part of “info” means the new version of niche aims to expand Gibson’s idea into the information age and digital environments. However, I want to claim that Infoniche doesn’t only refer to information environments or digital environments, but both traditional environments and digital environments. Moreover, the Infoniche framework also expands Gibson’s idea from natural environment to social environment by working with the concept of Supportance.

Unlike Roger Barker, Gibson doesn’t develop a systematic analysis framework for his version of niche. Inspired by Barker’s work on the theory of Behavior Settings, I develop a concrete analysis framework for applying the concept Infoniche to empirical studies.

So, I used the “Infoniche” thematic space as a cognitive container to collect related ideas for developing the framework.

1.2 The Structure of Infoniche

The Infoniche framework is designed with four dimensions and six levels of analysis. I used three steps to develop this framework.

First , I defined two types of dimensions as settings of infoniche. The first one is Routine Settings which refer to various normal settings of material environments (such as house, tools, cars, mobile phone, etc), individual habits and institutional norms. The second one is Cultural Settings which refers to ideology, cultural themes, mass media and social media content, etc. These two settings provide a concrete context and an abstract context for a person’s life.

Second, I defined two types of dimensions for understanding a person’s life. The first one is Embodied Actions which refer to individual body scale level actions. The second one is Social Activities which refer to various scales of social activities. The dimension of Embodied Actions corresponds to the analysis of Affordances while the dimension of Social Activities corresponds to the analysis of Supportances.

Third, I defined six levels of analysis based on the four dimensions. For the Routine Settings, I consider it as one level of analysis. For Cultural Settings, I pay attention to one idea called Themes of Practice. The most important part are Embodied Actions and Social Activities because they directly connect to Affordances and Supportances. In order to conceptualize an analysis framework, I selected a series of terms for this part:

Spot: the body scale minimal environment.
Zone: the one-to-one social interactional space.
Camp: the small group scale of social space.
Ba: the large scale of social space.

The term Spot refers to a minimal time-space scale environment which is the container of the body level immediate situational actions. The term Zone refers to a micro social space which contains the dyad, or two-person system of social interactions. The term Camp refers to a connected group of Zones. The term Ba refers to a large scale of social spaces such as a community, a field, a domain, etc.

Since affordances and supportances can only be perceived from environments, a person has to understand his or her environments in order to improve his or her life by actualizing various affordances and supportances. Based on these levels, the Infoniche framework offers an intervention tool called The Infoniche Checklist. The tool encourages people to reflect on their infroniche based on different levels of environments from three dimensions:

Exploit (productivity): it is related to normal affordances/supportances.
Explore (creativity): it is related to novel affordances/supportances.
Curate (curativity): it is related to organizing of multiple affordances/supportances.

The chart below lists some examples of questions for practical study and discussion.

Gibson’s niche is a great idea because it points to a way of intervention. However, his research are only about visual perception and psychological theories in general. The Infoniche framework offers a new account which can satisfy the need of explanation-oriented research and intervention-oriented study.

On April 24, 2021, I designed and published the above diagram which represents the Infoniche framework in a visual format.

I also suggest three types of Supportances for three types of social activities.

Zone: Ecological Offer
Project: Projectivity
Ba: Constructance

This diagram is inspired by the Supportive Cycle (v1.0) model which is a visual summary of the Platform-for-Development framework.

If you want to know more details about Ecological Offer, Projectivity, and Constructance, you can visit the original article about the Infoniche Model.

1.3 Information, Places, and Actions

Though I have developed the Infoniche framework and applied to the Platform-for-Development framework , I use the “infoniche” thematic space to developing my tacit knowledge about a hub which connects the following three themes:

Information
Places
Actions

In other words, we can consider my “Infoniche” thematic space as a container for curating the above three concepts together. Or, we can use “ Connected hub” to define such kind of thematic spaces. I don’t want to coin too many new terms, however the notion of “Connected hub” has its useful values because it refers to typical structure of framework for writing a theoretical book. For example:

Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Etienne Wenger, 1998)
Practice Theory, Work, & Organization (Davide Nicolini, 2012)
Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James’s Radical Empiricism (Harry Heft, 2001)

This is a simple heuristics of using three keywords to define a theme for your creative work. In this way, you can also use one thematic space to build a theoretical work and write a book.

1.4 Action-centered Information

Ecological psychologist James Gibson adopts a different view on “Information” because he wants to develop a theory about visual perception.

Though the core of Gibson’s theory is visual perception, we can see the whole “Perception-Affordance-Action” loop as a theory of action and apply it to new fields. Perceiving affordances is for taking actions, taking actions has an impact on the environment and changes affordances of the environment. I draw the diagram below to visualize this loop.

Gibson didn’t use a term called “Ecological Information”, I use this term to refer to the ecological approach to Information. Gibson’s view on Information is part of his Information Pickup theory which is different to traditional Information Processing theory.

The term information cannot have its familiar dictionary meaning of knowledge communicated to a receiver. This is unfortunate, and I would use another term if I could. The only resource is to ask the reader to remember that picking up information is not to be thought of as a case of communicating. The world does not speak to the observer. Animals and humans communicate with cries, gestures, speech, pictures, writing, and television, but we cannot hope to understand perception in terms of these channels; it is quite the other way around. Words and pictures convey information, carry it, or transmit it, but the information in the sea of energy around each of us, luminous or mechanical or chemical energy, is not conveyed. It is simply there. The assumption that information can be transmitted and the assumption that it can be stored are appropriate for the theory of communication, not for the theory of perception (p.231).

Gibson’s Information is not Shannon and Weaver’s Information. For Gibson, the qualities of objects are specified by information. The information in ambient light, along with sound, odor, touches, and natural chemicals, is inexhaustible.

As I mentioned before, I used the “Information as Light” metaphor to translate Gibson’s terms for digital environments. What is my version of “Information”? For the digital environment, do we pick up “Ecological Information”?

From the perspective of Gibson’s ecological approach, the “Organism-Environment” relationship is explained by a “perception-action” loop. In a particular situation, there is information specifying the structure of the environment; by pickuping ecological information, people perceive affordances of the environment; people select one or more affordances and take real actions.

Thus, I believe ecological information should tie to affordance and actions. In other words, Ecological Information is Action-centered Information. If an information points to potential actions for people, then we can claim it as Ecological Information. If an information doesn’t point to any potential action, then we can call it Content. See the flowchart below.

This principle helps us bypass the complex academic debate between Gibson’s Information Pickup theory and traditional Information Processing theory.

In fact, I also wrote a chapter titled Information and Actions in my 2020 book After Affordance. The chapter offers a typology of Action-centered Information. Now we can consider this typology as a part of the “Infoniche” thematic space.

Part 2: Sparks

The above discussions offer a background about the “Infoniche” thematic space, the rest of articles share several new sparks for the “Infoniche” thematic space.

In Thematic Space: Sparks In, Statue Out, I use “Sparks” to describe the basic unit of tacit knowledge. This is a metaphor.

For the present discussion, I use “Sparks” to refer to daily inspirations.

2.1 Jan 30: A Tiny Place without Sign

In the morning of Jan 30, I moved a ladder to my room in order to replace a dead light bulb. Then I took the following pictures.

Why did I take these pictures? I want to show readers a tiny place without a sign: the place around the blue mini platform.

This is an example of Spot of Infoniche. Spot refers to the body scale minimal environment which is defined by a set of Affordances. We can perceive the affordance of the mini platform without any sign.

2.2 Jan 30: A Sign for Place

The afternoon of Jan 30, I went to the Apple store to repair my iMac. I took the following pictures.

This sign indicates a place called Genius Bar.

This place is part of a workflow and Apple’s customer service system. Once a place has its name, it could be coded into a workflow and a software system.

2.3 Jan 31: A Sign for Time

The morning of Jan 31, I forgot to put a water bottle into my son’s backpack. So I went to his school to send the water bottle. It was 8:18 a.m. I took the following pictures.

This sign doesn’t indicate a place, but a time which refers to a special type of social behavior.

2.4 Jan 31: A Sign for a Collective Moment

Jan 31 is the Chinese New Year’s eve of 2022. I found a sign from the Wechat app which is a convenient way of connecting my family and friends in mainland China.

The below picture is a screenshot of a moment of a friend of mine on Wechat.

Even though you don’t know how to read Chinese characters, you can clearly see a tiger-like shape which contains several Chinese characters.

For some readers who are not familiar with Chinese culture, you can check Spring Festival Gala, Wechat, and Chinese Zodiac on Wikipedia.

Spring Festival Gala is an annual TV show which is hosted by CCTV to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The first CCTV New Year’s Gala was hosted in 1983. During the past almost 40 years, it has become a new ritual for Chinese people.

The Wechat app is the most popular multi-purpose mobile app in China.

According to the Chinese Zodiac which assigns an animal to a year in a twelve-year cycle, Years of the Tiger include 2022, 2010, 1998, 1986, 1974, 1962, 1950, 1938…For 2022, the Year of Tiger starts from February 1, 2022.

If we put the above three information pieces together, then we can understand the behavior behind the screenshot.

Wechat released a new feature called “Posting Greetings of the Year of Tiger while watching the Spring Festival Gala”.
The new feature offers a Tiger-like frame.
My friend posted a greeting “健健康康, 虎年大吉”(Wishing you health and luck in the year of the Tiger!)

Wechat may remove the feature after the 2022 Spring Festival Gala. However, the Tiger-like shape is definitely a sign for a collective moment.

2.5 Jan 31: A Sign without Boundary

I also found the following picture from Wechat on Jan 31. It is a face of a tiger.

However, the designer used several heterogeneous elements to form the meaningful whole:

Chinese characters: “虎年大吉”(Wishing you luck in the year of the Tiger!)
Number: 2022
Visual Symbols: Chinese coins, Firecracker, Bird of Peace, Gold ingot, etc.

For this design, there is no boundary between language/text and visual image. They work together as a meaningful whole.

Part 3 Reflection

While the above sparks are assigned to the “infoniche” thematic space, we can also use them to discuss other topics.

3.1 Signs, Artifacts, and Meanings

The three keywords of “infoniche” are Information, Places, and Actions. Now we can select other keywords to discuss a new theme. For example:

Signs
Artifacts
Meanings

If you want to know more about these topics, I’d like to recommend Clay Spinuzzi’s blog and one post about Marx Warftofsky’s book Models.

Here, Wartofsky runs in parallel with Vygotskian ideas of mediation, and also emphasizes the cultural reproduction in which artifacts are enacted. He goes on to offer a typology of artifacts:
Primary artifacts: “those directly used” in “the production of the means of existence and in the reproduction of the species” (p.202), such as “axes, clubs, needles, bowls, etc.” (p.201).
Secondary artifacts: “those used in the preservation and transmission of the acquired skills or modes of action or praxis by which the production is carried out. Secondary artifacts are therefore representations of such modes of action, and in this sense are mimetic, not simply of the objects of an environment which are of interest or use in this production, but of these objects as they are acted on, or upon the mode of operation or action involving such objects” (p.202).
Through these representations, “nature becomes transformed, not only in the direct practical way of becoming cultivated, or shaped into objects of use … it becomes transformed as an object or arena of action… nature itself has become historicized and socialized, and has come to be a representation of a certain mode of praxis or human action” (p.206).
Tertiary artifacts: Artifacts that are “abstracted from their direct representational function” (p.209); they “can come to constitute a relatively autonomous ‘world’, in which the rules, conventions and outcomes no longer appear directly practical,” especially “when the conventions of representation … become transparent” (p.208). He gives the example of a mimetic reenactment of a hunt or rehearsal for a hunt (p.207). These are “alternative imaginative perceptual modes, freed from the direct representation of ongoing forms of action, and relatively autonomous in this sense,” but still they feed “back into actual praxis, as a representation of possibilities which go beyond present actualities” (p.209). While Wartofsky gives the example of reenacting a hunt, I think tertiary artifacts may cover examples such as formal logic that is abstracted from the actual problems it is trying to represent, or algorithms, or abstract formulas that can be applied to codified data (f=ma).

I personally pay attention to a special type of artifact which is a combination of Language/information/text and Material. For example, printed books, and many signs.

3.2 The “Infowoo(信息物)” thematic space

In 2017, I was fascinated by the special type of artifact which is “a combination of Language/information/text and Material”. In order to save time, I name the type of artifact Infowoo(信息物).

The new term Infowoo(信息物) is a combination of a English word “Info” and a sound of a Chinese character “woo(物)”.

The “woo(物)” means material objects.

Anyway, the term “Infoniche” is a private label for naming one of my thematic spaces.

Now let’s have a look at my “Infowoo” thematic space. The below picture is one of pictures of the thematic space.

Why did I take the above picture? Because there is no real fire extinguisher under the sign “Fire Extinguisher”.

On April 30, 2017, I took the following picture:

Why did I take the above picture? If the sign of “$5.99” is removed, then we wouldn’t know we can buy these geodes.

Now, we could consider “Infowoo” is both about “Information, Places, and Actions” and “Signs, Artifacts, and Meanings”.

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