Mapping Thematic Space #6: The “Life” thematic space

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35 min readFeb 18, 2022

Where is the starting point of the process of theorizing something?

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:

On Feb 4, 2022, I shared the Life Strategy Framework (v1.0) and a knowledge curation canvas about the framework on Linkedin.

I had a wonderful discussion about these ideas with Bülent Duagi who is a strategic adviser and organization designer for tech companies.

This article will start with a discussion.

A Discussion about “Life Strategy”
Anticipatory Activity System
The Life Strategy Framework (v1.0)
A Toolkit for Life Discovery
The Starting Point of the Life Discovery Toolkit
Life as “Activity” or “Project”
The Life Curation Framework (2019)
The “Life Theory” Document
A Perspective on Social Life
The Wisdom of Life
A Matrix of Life
Architecture > Life Patterns
Relevance > Life Themes
Activity > Life Performance
Opportunity > Life Discovery
The Order of Life

1. A Discussion about “Life Strategy”

On Feb 4, 2022, I shared The Dialogue Knowledge Curation Framework on Linkedin. See the canvas below.

The example is “Life Strategy” (Life as Anticipatory Activity System) and I used the draft I made on Jan 28, 2022. Bülent Duagi and I discussed some ideas behind the canvas.

Bülent Duagi:

A lot of interconnections to reflect upon. Thanks, Oliver!
Wonder if the shift from “Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System” (in your previous article) to “Life as Anticipatory Activity System” is intentional?
If so, what influenced this shift?

Oliver Ding:

I think it is not a shift because “Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System” is a general framework. “Life Strategy” is an application of the general framework.
There is an issue called “Platform Orientation” which refers to selecting the direction of application for a general framework, a theory, or a platform. For example, the “Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System” can be applied to “Organizational Strategy” and “Life Strategy”, however, I found I don’t have rich work experiences on “Organizational Strategy”. So, I choose “Life Strategy”. It also echoes my work Platform for Development which also emphasizes the individual perspective.
As mentioned in the article about my “Strategy” thematic space, I found “Life Strategy” can be understood as a dialogue between Life (Developmental Psychology) and Strategy (Strategic Management), so it matches my vision of cross-boundary knowledge curation. I’d like to accept it as a challenge for me.
Also, I expanded the theoretical source for “Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System” from the original two (Activity Theory and Anticipatory System Theory) to five. You can click the above canvas and read the details in a large view. I am not sure I will keep the name.

Bülent Duagi:

Ok, so you actually mean “Life Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System” instead of “Life as Anticipatory Activity System”, which seemed quite a leap.
“Life” is, of course, way more than “Life Strategy”. Thanks for clarifying!

Oliver Ding:

A good point. Actually, we can consider “Life” as an “Anticipatory Activity System”. And the five pairs of themes can be used to describe essential themes of “Life”.
So, if we remove the text “Life Strategy” from the above canvas, it still works well. Thanks for the inspiration.
Now we have three things:
1. “Life Strategy” as an oriented concept
2. “Life Strategy” as Anticipatory Activity System
3. “Life” as Anticipatory Activity System
“Life Strategy” as an oriented concept, means it is a thing for studying. And we can develop many frameworks and theories to understand it.
“Life Strategy” as an Anticipatory Activity System, this means we adopt the Anticipatory Activity System to understand “Life Strategy” because it is a good match between a thing and a theory.
“Life” as an Anticipatory Activity System, could be a new project for discussing “Life”. However, as mentioned above, the canvas expanded to five theories. I think it is better to use a new name for this project.

I also added comments about the Lifesystem framework and the iART Framework. I will mention these two ideas in the following sections.

2. Anticipatory Activity System

The Anticipatory Activity System is an expanded version of the iART Framework which was born from an empirical research project about an adult development program.

The program was designed with three components: 1) Life Purpose Awareness, 2) Personal OKR Practice, 3) Peer Review and Feedback. My friend also adopted the Building In Public approach to sharing her goals, challenges, progress, and discussions with others on social media platforms.

I use the Project Engagement approach to guide my research about the program. The approach uses a method called “Multiple-level Project Engagement”. I reflect on the following levels:

- The “My friend — Members” Engagement
- The “Member — Member” Engagement
- The “I — My friend” Engagement

This method is what I called “Cultural Projection Analysis” of Project-oriented Activity Theory. You can find more details here: Activity U (X): Projecting, Projectivity, and Cultural Projection.

As mentioned above, the program has three components: 1) Life Purpose Awareness, 2) Personal OKR Practice, and 3) Peer Review and Feedback. We can roughly understand it as a Life Strategy Doing project. In order to understand the whole program, I made several diagrams and frameworks. One of the by-products of the research project is the Anticipatory Activity System framework.

Why did I use “Self, Other, Present, Future” (this is the iART Framework) as the core of the framework?

It matches the program’s two components:

Life Purpose Awareness: the “Present — Future” conversation will lead to a life strategy.
Peer Review and Feedback: the “Self — Other” conversation will change a person’s decision and behavior.

The first-order activity is about a person’s performance which is guided by their OKRs. The second-order activity refers to the planning and reviewing of their OKRs.

OKRs stands for “Objectives and Key Results” which is a concrete framework for goal setting and management.

The Anticipatory Activity System framework is not a concrete framework, but an abstract model. It offers a general framework for understanding Second-order Activity from the perspective of Anticipatory Systems Theory. In order words, the Anticipatory Activity System framework is a hybrid theoretical framework that curates the following two theories together:

Activity Theory
Anticipatory System Theory

This hybrid approach is inspired by Clay Spinuzzi’s book Network: Theorizing Knowledge Work in Telecommunications. In order to understand a telecommunications company’s knowledge work, Clay Spinuzzi focuses on the concept of “Network”, and adopts the following two theories to build an abstract framework for theorizing the “Network” of knowledge work:

Activity Theory
Actor-network Theory (ANT)

Can we adopt more than two theories to develop abstract frameworks? I am not sure. It might just lead to a brand new theory.

3. The Life Strategy Framework (v1.0)

In 2021, I applied the Anticipatory Activity System framework to study Strategy. On Sept 15, 2021, I published D as Diagramming: Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System.

Since the article is part of the D as Diagramming project which aims to explore the power of diagrams and diagramming, I used the article as an example for testing the value of diagrams for turning tacit knowledge into explicit knowledge.

I claimed that the post is a rough idea, not a formal proposal. I also mentioned the scope of applications of the framework. The new framework is perfect for thinking about the complex of “Self, Other, Present, Future”. For example:

Sustainable Business Development
Organizational Strategy
Startup Studio or Venture Studio
Technology Choices
Educational Strategy
Family Development
Intimate Relationships

Since the iART Framework is inspired by the Anticipatory System Theory, I name this new diagram Anticipatory Activity System.

I mentioned Intimate Relationships. Yes, the Anticipatory Activity System framework can be applied to study Intimate Relationships.

I didn’t mention Life Strategy on Sep 15, 2021. However, I realized that it is perfect for applying it to discuss Life Strategy in Dec 2021.

On Jan 28, 2022, I introduced the idea “the Life Strategy framework (v1.0)” to a new friend who read the article about D as Diagramming: Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System and wondered if she could use it for her projects.

I curated the Anticipatory Activity System framework and several related frameworks together, and named them “Life Strategy”. I considered it as multiple theory curation:

Anticipatory Systems Theory: Present — Future
Relevance Theory: Self — Other
Activity Theory: Object — Outcome
Project-oriented Activity Theory: Theme — Identity
Curativity Theory: Pieces — Whole

I also found some related models from my works:

iART Framework
The Defining Zone
A Typology of Relevance
The Activity System Model (adopted from Activity Theory)
The Developmental Project Model
The Themes of Practice Framework
The Life-as-Activity Framework
The Creative Work Canvas

As mentioned above, I am expanding the Anticipatory Activity System framework from the original two theories to more theories. It might lead to a new creation.

So, I’d like to keep the Anticipatory Activity System framework as an independent thing and name the new thing “Life Strategy” or other names.

4. A Toolkit for Life Discovery

On Feb 3, 2022, I published Thematic Space: The “Strategy” thematic space and mentioned my focus on the “Toolkit” and the “Dialogue”.

Originally, I was busy dealing with friends’ requests about practical suggestions about strategy. So, I framed the notion of “Life Strategy” as a practical toolkit. However, I realized that I could detach from the “toolkit” and attach to the “dialogue” which is mentioned above.

What is the dialogue?

My notion of “Life Strategy” can be understood as a dialogue between my “Life” thematic space and my “Strategy” thematic space.
If we jump out of my thematic spaces, we can consider the concept of “Life Strategy” as a dialogue between the field of “Developmental Psychology” and the field of “Strategic Management”.
I called this method Double Dialogues which is a technique of the Knowledge Curation framework.

The above diagram visualized the above switch of my focus.

Before: the focus of my mind is on the “Heuristics” block which belongs to the Practice Field.
After: the focus of my mind moves to the “Approaches” block which belongs to the Theory Field.
Then: the new focus led to a new project which is on the “Projects” block.

Later, I used Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) to name the toolkit project. The toolkit was published on Feb 7, 2022.

5. The Starting Point of the Life Discovery Toolkit

The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) uses Life Aspiration Orientation as the starting point. I use the three dimensions to start the difficult conversation for life development:

Epistemic Impact (Knowledge Heroes)
Market Impact (Business Heroes)
Social Impact (Social Change Heroes)

The toolkit is not for discussing traditional career development, but life as a meaningful whole. We care about the real impact you can make. You can make an impact through a paid job or other activities.

These three dimensions don’t mean there are only three choices. It just highlights the directions of free space. You can find a dot in the space and move around since life is a continuous flow.

You can also use it for long-term biographical reflection. For example, the attached diagram is my own story.

Market Impact: Before 2008

The first stage of my career (1994–2001) was about advertising, marketing, and communication.

From 2001 to 2007, I worked for several private investors who are active in investing in mainland China, Hong Kong, and the United States. Following first-round investments, I helped start-ups raise successive rounds of funds from venture capital firms and then raised funds from public markets through IPOs.

Social Impact: 2004–2014

I spent most of my spare time on non-profit online communities for social learning, open education, free culture, etc. I used the theme of Nomad of Community to highlight the constancy of my activities of community building because I always joined a community or started a community.

Epistemic Impact: After 2014

I started learning Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and other theories around 2014. In 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity and developed a theory about general curation. In 2020, I started the Knowledge Curation project which aims to connect Theory and Practice.

The Life Aspiration Orientation module is adopted from the Project Engagement Toolkit.

In fact, I had a new idea for the Life Discovery Toolkit on Jan 23, 2022. See the diagram below.

I use three dimensions of the concept of “Life” to develop the above model. There are at least three ways to understand the concept of “Life”.

Life as Organism: this is the perspective of biological theories.
Life as Practice: this is the perspective of social theories.
Life as Ideal Type: this is the perspective of humanities.

These three perspectives can be called Biological Life, Sociocultural Life, and Spiritual Life. I also defined three types of Freedom.

Why did I choose “Freedom” as a core concept for this idea? On Jan 1, 2022, I designed the Strategist’s Mandala and used “Degrees of Freedom” as its primary theme. I learned the term from the Japanese strategy consultant Kenichi Ohmae’s writings.

However, “Degrees of Freedom” is a traditional term of strategic thinking in the context of business competitions. For individual life development, I don’t consider competition as the first thing.

Material Freedom: Independence of both Sociocultural Life and Biological Life.
Mental Freedom: Independence of both Spiritual Life and Biological Life.
Cultural Freedom: Independence of Sociocultural Life and Spiritual Life.

This model leads to a challenge: What’s Freedom? My rough answer is the following diagram. I use a simple formula to define “Freedom”. The pair of concepts of “Supply — Demand” is inspired by economics. Also, I was inspired by the developmental psychologist Robert Kegan’s 1994 book In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life.

In Over Our Heads focuses on the fit or lack of fit between what the culture demands of our minds and our mental capacity to meet these demands. According to Robert Kegan, “The psychological phenomenon is the evolution of consciousness, the personal unfolding of ways of organizing experience that are not simply replaced as we grow but subsumed into more complex systems of mind…The cultural phenomenon is the ‘hidden curriculum,’ the idea that to the list of artifacts and arrangements a culture creates and the social sciences study we should add the claims or demands the culture makes on the minds of its constituents.”(1994, p.9)

Kegan’s “psychological — cultural” dialogue approach is the seed of my ideas about the above three types of freedoms. It’s clear that I want to expand the “psychological — cultural” dialogue to the “psychological — biological” dialogue and the “cultural — biological” dialogue.

The above diagram is my intuitive idea about the model which leads to a slogan: Being by Doing. It looks like this is a dialogue between Humanistic Psychology and Activity Theory.

Activity Theory: Doing means delivering “Value” as Offers to others.
Humanistic Psychology: Being means maintaining “Equilibrium” as Order for self.

If a person wants to offer values to satisfy others’ demands, he or she should keep a good order for internal equilibrium in order to maintain the supply system.

This is an interesting idea. However, it requires more deep work. In order to deliver a toolkit to my friends and other indie creators, I decided to directly adopt a module from the Project Engagement Toolkit. I will keep the “Being by Doing” idea for the theoretical dialogue project.

6. Life as “Activity” or “Project”

The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) also led to the Life-as-Project approach. On Feb 13, I wrote an article titled Life Discovery: The Life-as-Project Approach.

I used the diagram of the Life-as-Activity framework (v2.0) to design the Life-as-Project approach.

What’s the difference between “the Life-as-Activity Framework (v2.0)” and “the Life-as-Project Approach”?

The Life-as-Activity Framework (v2.0) aims to develop a framework for discussing life development with the framework of Activity Theory. So, I can’t adopt Howard E. Gruber’s evolving systems approach to the study of creative work (1974,1989) for the framework.
The Life-as-Project Approach is a “Project-centered” approach. I don’t have to remain within the framework of Activity Theory. Now, I can adopt Howard E. Gruber’s evolving systems approach to the study of creative work (1974,1989) for the approach.

Can I put these two approaches together?

Gruber’s approach uses “Task — Project — Enterprise — Network of Enterprise” as a structure. This is different from Activity Theory’s “Operation — Action — Activity” hierarchy.

The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) uses Gruber’s structure because it is perfect for discussing lifespan development.

Originally, the Project Engagement toolkit was born from the work of Project-oriented Activity Theory. Now, it is an instrument for practitioners. The Life-as-Project approach continuously expands my “Project” thematic space. It seems that I am building a Project-centered approach.

The Project-centered approach gives me more freedom to try something new. For example, I can’t discuss individuals’ identities and life themes within the framework of Activity Theory. For the Life-as-Activity (v0.3) version, I had to adopt other psychological theories to discuss some topics. Now the Project-centered approach can start from the Developmental Project model and expand to other ideas.

The events below are the historical development of the Life-as-Activity project.

The Life-as-Activity (v0.3) version was published on Nov 29, 2020.
Project-oriented Activity Theory (book-in-draft) was published on Jan 24, 2021.
The Project Engagement was published on Feb 3, 2021.
The Developmental Project Model was born on March 31, 2021.
Themes of Practice (2019–2021) was published on August 7, 2021.
The Life-as-Activity Framework (v2.0) was published on Sept 10, 2021.
The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1) was published on Feb 7, 2022.
The Life-as-Project Approach was published on Feb 13, 2022.

A major milestone of the project is the Developmental Project Model and its empirical research cases. During the past year, I conducted several empirical research on the Developmental Project Model with the Project Engagement method.

Can we consider the Life-as-Project approach as a type of Activity-theoretical approach?

Yes, “Project” is a great unit of analysis of activity/practice for keeping individual perspective and collective perspective. I just follow Andy Blunden’s direction.

According to Andy Blunden, “Project” as a unit of Activity and as a starting point for Activity Theory is an interdisciplinary concept for the following reason (2014, p.15)

A project is a focus on an individual’s motivation, the indispensable vehicle for the exercise of their will and thus the key determinant of their psychology and the process which produces and reproduces the social fabric.
Projects, therefore, give direct expression to the identity of the sciences of the mind and the social sciences.
Projects belong to both; a project is a concept of both psychology and sociology.
Social and political theory resting on the concept of “project” is humanist because it gives realistic expression to the agency of individuals in societal affairs and concrete content to social relations.

The Life-as-Project Approach doesn’t mean the end of the Life-as-Activity Project. It means a new phase of the project.

7. The Life Curation Framework (2019)

The Life Strategy Knowledge Curation canvas (see the picture below) also highlights a practical perspective called Life Curation.

In Dec 2019, I had a discussion with a friend about her career development. In order to share my insights from the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach and Curativity Theory, I made a file titled Life Curation.

The Life Curation framework was based on the Ecological Practice approach and Curativity Theory. The diagram below is a model of the early version of the Ecological Practice approach.

In order to apply the above model to discuss Life Development or Career Development, I translated the above theoretical concepts into operational concepts:

Container > Social Container
Forces > Challenges
Acts > Responses
Enter > Resources
Exit > Results
Events > Social Events
Information > Information
Affordances > Opportunities
Actor > Actor

The new framework has four modules:

Double R Analysis: the “Resources — Results” Analysis
Social Event Analysis: the “Challenge — Response” Analysis
Social Attachance Analysis: the “Exit — Exit” Analysis
Opportunity Analysis: the “Information — Opportunities — Action” Analysis

I used normal words such as “Resources”, “Results”, “Challenge”, “Responses”, and “Opportunities” as operational concepts. However, I also offered some new perspectives for understanding these words in order to make more creative spaces for life development.

The most important value of the Ecological Practice approach is its perspective indicates the ecological meaning of objects and environments. It is very useful for rethinking Resources and Opportunities.

You can also find a story about the “Challenge — Response” Analysis here.

Why did I name the framework Life Curation? There are two reasons:

Its core is Social Container and this is the core of Curativity Theory. Social Containers create many boundaries in our life. These boundaries cut our life into pieces. The Life Curation Curation aims to turn these pieces into a meaningful whole.
The “Resources — Results” Analysis can be applied to different time-scale analyses. The framework suggests that a person could build his or her own creative containers in order to curate pieces of resources into meaningful results.

The essential theme behind the Life Curation framework is the “Pieces — Whole” relationship. I also consider it an important theme for the Life Strategy framework.

8. The “Life Theory” Document

In Feb 2020, I wrote a 160-page private document titled Life Theory.

The “Life Theory” document is both a theoretical plan and a toolkit. As a theoretical plan, 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.

The core of the “Life Theory” Document is a three-layer framework:

Lifemove
Lifeway
Lifeform

I don’t use this three-layer structure for the newest version of the Ecological Practice approach. However, I used it to design the following diagram on Jan 24, 2022.

The Shaman’s Mandal aims to introduce core concepts of the Ecological Practice approach to ordinary readers. For life strategy and related issues, these four theoretical concepts have some heuristic orientations for thinking.

Affordance: Material Adaptability
Supportance: Social Adaptability
Attachance: Sense of Boundaryless
Curativity: Sense of Wholeness

These heuristic orientations refer to the benefits of learning these concepts and mastering related skills.

Material Adaptability refers to a person’s competence in actualization of affordance and material engagement while Social Adaptability refers to a person’s competence in the actualization of supportances and human engagement. There is a gap between potential possibilities, a person has to develop his skills and capabilities in order to take Affordances and Supportances.

Attachance leads to a Sense of Boundaryless because actions of Attaching and Detaching reduce the boundary’s impact on a person. Curativity leads to a Sense of Wholeness because actions of turning pieces into a meaningful whole increase the skill of making sense of wholeness.

I think these four benefits are important for life strategy and discovery.

9. A Perspective on Social Life

One important concept I didn’t plan in the “Life Theory” document is the concept of Supportance.

The goal of the Ecological Practice approach is to expand Jame J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology from natural environments to social environments.

Once we move the unit of analysis from natural environments to social environments, we can make a distinction between the concept of Affordance for discussing natural environments and a brand new concept for discussing social environments. Furthermore, we can form a hierarchical loop of ‘Affordance — a new concept’ and discuss the relationship between the two layers because the discussion of ‘taking affordances’ also needs to consider social conditions.

In Oct 2020, I coined the term Supportance and developed it as a theoretical concept for the Ecological Practice approach. I believe the concept of Supportance is a perfect notion as a new unit of analysis for developing a new social theory that goes beyond the scope of ecological psychology.

Based on the pairs of concepts of “Affordance — Supportance”, I developed the Lifesystem Framework in Dec 2020. Later, I published an article titled Lifesystem: Modeling Ice Skating and Other Social Practices on Sept 30, 2021.

The Lifesystem framework is not for all things of life, but only the life of working. However, the framework understands “working” in the broad sense. It considers paid work and non-paid work as a whole as a career. It also considers playing as a special type of “working”.

It also echoes the concept of “Activity” from Activity Theory. According to Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi, the founder of Activity Theory considered Life as the name of his theory.

Leontiev’s ambition was to translate this general statement into a concrete description of how the first phenomena that can be called “psyche” emerged in history, and how they developed into the current variety of mental phenomena.
To accomplish this goal Leontiev needed a special kind of analytical tool, a concept more general than psyche, that would make it possible to define the context in which the psyche emerges and develops.
An obvious candidate for such a concept is “Life”, since ultimately this is what undergoes evolutionary change. However, this concept is too general and too vague. “Activity,” as we will see below, was chosen by Leontiev as a concept that can provide a more concrete insight into what “Life” is.(Acting with Technology: Activity Theory and Interaction Design, p.51–52)

I have been working on the Activity U project as a knowledge curator. I’d like to point out similarities and differences between Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory.

At the general philosophical level, both Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory share the same view of the inseparability of human beings and the world. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi claimed, “In Western thought, the fundamental insight of the inseparability of subjects and objects is expressed, for instance, in the philosophical views of Hegel and Marx, Goethe’s poetry, Brentano’s ‘act psychology’, and the ecological psychology of Gibson.” (2012, p.13)

However, there is an important theoretical difference between Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory. Activity theorists define the “activity” as “object-oriented”, according to Leontiev, “Any activity of an organism is directed at a certain object; an ‘objectless’ activity is impossible” (Leontiev, 1981).

Ecological psychologists don’t use “activity” as a theoretical concept, they use “action” and “activity” interchangeably. Ecological psychologist Edward S. Reed (1996) pointed out there are two kinds of actions, “We should thus differentiate between two kinds of activity, performatory and exploratory — because the selective contingencies are very different for the two cases. Exploratory activity, as I call the scanning for and use of information (following James Gibson; see Reed, 1988a) typically does not require the expenditure of a significant amount of force to alter the substances or surfaces of the environment. Instead, it involves the adjustment of the head and sensory organs to the ambient energy fields. These adjustments are typically embodied in cyclic, low-energy and low-impact movements of the sense organs or the head. The selective advantage thus obtainable is that of having information useful for regulating one’s activity pattern. These latter performatory activities are precisely those cases in which the animal does use significant amounts of force to alter the substances and surfaces of its environment. It is one thing to see or to smell a piece of food, it is quite another thing to obtain it, masticate it, and eat it — and this applies whether one is a dragonfly or a mammalian carnivore.”(1996, pp. 80–81)

In order to apply the Ecological Practice approach to several domains, I need a framework as a bridge to connect theory and practice. This is the reason I want to develop the Lifesystem framework.

The Lifesystem framework is also inspired by Yrjö Engeström’s Activity System model (1987) and Elizabeth Shove’s Dynamics of Social Practice (2012).

Yrjö Engeström’s purpose is to develop a framework for studying organizational innovation.

Elizabeth Shove’s purpose is to develop a framework for conducting consumer research.

My purpose behind the Lifesystem framework is to build a bridge between the ecological practice approach and a creative career or creative life.

In fact, the Lifesystem framework is developed as an Abstract Model for researchers. For ordinary people, I’d like to highlight its heuristic values with the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0). It aims to answer the following question:

How well do you adapt to environments?

The above diagram is part of the C2 — Lifesystem Perspective which is a module of the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0).

Lifeway: human—material engagement, it’s all about individual actions.
Lifeform: human—human engagement, it’s all about social contexts.

For the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0), Lifeway refers to Material Adaptability while Lifeform refers to Social Adaptability. How to improve your Material Adaptability? One way is to understand the theoretical concept of “Affordance”. How to improve your Social Adaptability? The concept of “Supportance” can help you.

The Lifesystem framework is a large framework for modeling social life and social practices, there are many ideas within the framework. You can find more details here.

10. The Wisdom of Life

One of my knowledge heroes is James G. March (1928–2018) who was an American political scientist, sociologist, and a pioneer of organizational decision-making. He mentioned that there are three types of wisdom in his 2010 book The Ambiguities of Experience.

What are the three types of wisdom?

Models: a model is an abstract cognitive representation.
Stories: a story is a model too, but it is easy to understand.
Actions: you just do it, then you get it.

What March suggested roughly echoes three types of social sciences.

Models: Explanation (such as Systems and Rational Choices)
Stories: Understanding (such as Culture and Subjective meanings)
Actions: Intervention (Such as Critical theory and Action Science)

On Jan 11, 2022, I designed a diagram for visualizing the context of Developing Tacit Knowledge. I use the “Flow — Story — Model” structure to organize the context of knowing. It’s clear that my idea was inspired by March’s idea.

Though the above diagram was designed for discussing Developing Tacit Knowledge, we can consider it as a framework of the Wisdom of Life.

As March mentioned, there is a trade-off between accuracy and comprehensiveness, “Experience is rooted in a complicated causal system that can be described adequately only by a description that is too complex for the human mind. The more accurately reality is reflected, the less comprehensible the story, and the more comprehensible the story, the less realistic it is.”

My “Life” thematic space is a large cognitive container that contains many ideas I developed in the past several years. What a mess!

11. A Matrix of Life

On Feb 4, 2022, I got an idea about the dialogue between my “Life” thematic space and my “Strategy” thematic space.

In Thematic Space: The “Strategy” thematic space, I used the following framework to generate four practical perspectives for my “Strategy” thematic space.

The above diagram is my Personal Epistemological Framework which was developed in 2017. It is an epistemological framework for curating my learning outcome and reflecting on my work experiences. As a lifelong thinker, I was satisfied with this practical framework as an outcome in the middle of 2017. Basically, the four thematic spaces refer to four ways of connecting theory and practice.

The “Architecture” thematic space connects my work experiences in Information Architecture and my learning of cognitive science.
The “Relevance” thematic space connects my work experiences in advertising/media/marketing and my learning of semiotics/communication study/culture study.
The “Opportunity” thematic space connects my life experience in my kids’ childhood and my learning of ecological psychology’s Affordance theory and my own work the Ecological Practice approach which was born in 2018.
The “Activity” thematic space connects my work experience with various domains and my learning of Activity Theory.

I used the above matrix to generate four Practical Perspectives for discussing Strategy.

Architecture > Strategic Thinking
Relevance > Strategic Discourse
Activity > Strategic Acting
Opportunity > Strategic Awareness

The insight about my “Life” thematic space is that I can use the matrix for my “Life” thematic space too!

Architecture > Life Patterns
Relevance > Life Themes
Activity > Life Performance
Opportunity > Life Discovery

The rest of the article will expand these four practical perspectives.

12. Architecture > Life Patterns

For the Diagramming as Practice Framework, I used the “Architecture” thematic space to generate a practical perspective: Cognitive Representation.

For the “Strategy” thematic space, I used the “Architecture” thematic space to generate a practical perspective: Strategic Thinking.

For the “Life” thematic space, I used the “Architecture” thematic space to generate a practical perspective: Life Patterns.

Why can I generate three different Practical Perspectives from one thematic space? Because a thematic space is a large cognitive container, if we apply a thematic space to understand something, we can have many choices. We can generate a Practical Perspective for a particular thing.

For “Life Strategy”, I pay attention to a person’s strategic cognitive capability. How can we help a person improve her strategic thinking competence in order to cope with life challenges?

For the “Life” thematic space, I think the focus should be Variant and Invariant of Life Content. There are some significant events in a person’s life, for example, Birth, Death, Daycare, Graduation, Marriage, Work, Retirement, Drive, Travel, etc.

Donald E. Super’s Life Career Rainbow is a good starting point for understanding Life Patterns. For each significant life event, we can find relevant knowledge models which describe the structure, dynamics, and patterns of these events.

Donald E. Super’s theory is named A life-span, life-space approach to career development. You can find more details here.

13. Relevance > Life Themes

For the Diagramming as Practice Framework, I used the “Relevance” thematic space to generate a practical perspective: Cultural Significance. In fact, I developed a typology of Relevance.

We can apply the above typology of Relevance to discuss Strategy. However, in order to highlight the communication between Self and Other, I use “Strategic Discourse” as a practical perspective.

The Strategic Discourse perspective refers to the negotiation between Self and Others around the strategic relevance. Since there are four levels of analysis, we can find various theoretical resources for discussing Strategy.

For the “Life” thematic space, I decided to use “Life Themes” as a practical perspective. There are two reasons behind the decision.

The “Relevance” thematic space refers to Self and Other in the context of cultural significance. For Self, “Life Themes” means individual life themes. For Others, “Life Themes” means social life themes or collective cultural themes.
My own work, Themes of Practice, offers a solution for achieving a balance between individual life themes and collective cultural themes.

I have read many books about the concept of Themes. I realized this is an interdisciplinary topic. The concept of Themes connects to Mind, Creativity, Action, and Practice.

In 2019, I developed the idea of “Themes of Practice” in order to discuss the “meaning” of the meaningful whole for my book Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice. I realized the notion of “Theme” is an excellent tool for curating experiences and actions.

Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical concept called “themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life theme.” If we put culture themes and life themes together, we see a “great debate” of social science: “individual — collective.”

I consider Themes of Practice as a process type of concept, not a substance type of concept. Thus, it is not a new category of themes, but a transformational process between individual life themes and collective culture themes. It refers to both concept and action. It connects mind and practice. It indicates the transformation of both person and society.

In April 2021, I started learning Genre Theory. I designed a new diagram for Themes of Practice and developed a framework and a canvas.

Later, I applied the Themes of Practice framework to study Career Development and focused on Career Themes. Finally, it led to a book titled Themes of Practice: The Information Architecture of Social Life.

You can find more details about Themes of Practice here.

14. Activity > Life Performance

The “Activity” thematic space refers to Activity Theory, Social Practice theories, and similar theoretical approaches.

For the Diagramming as Practice Framework, I used the “Activity” thematic space to generate a practical perspective: “Mediating Instrument”(1, 2). This perspective is adopted from Activity Theory.

For discussing Strategy, I use “Strategic Acting” as a practical perspective. And we can find some theoretical approaches:

Strategy as Practice: an activity-based approach (Paula Jarzabkowski, 2005)
Strategic Doing (Edward Morrison, 2019)
More “Strategy-as-Practice” approaches: Cambridge Handbook of Strategy as Practice (2010, 2015)

The “Strategic Acting” perspective echoes what strategic management scholars called “Strategic process”.

For the “Life” thematic space, I’d like to use Life Performance as a practical perspective.

What does Life Performance mean? I’d like to share some related ideas.

The “Performance” Zone of Project
The Stage Metaphor
Fred Newman’s cultural-performatory approach

The “Performance” Zone is one of five Zones of Project. For the initial version of Zone of Project, I identified five themes, five positions, and the following five zones:

“Idea”
“Resource”
“Program”
“Performance”
“Solution”

I defined “Performance” as “the dynamic process of doing something and saying something as the performance of project”.

The “Performance” refers to the concrete actions of a project. It also refers to the various ways of participating in a project. For example, I have mentioned the TEDx project in the previous article. According to the official website of TED, as of December 31, 2020, there are 35,713 local TEDx events that were held in more than 130 countries. The TEDx Talks library contained over 30,000 videos from these local TEDx events. There are various ways of participating in the TEDx community, such as organizing, curating, hosting, designing, speaking, sponsoring, photographing, videoing, lighting, translating, listening, watching, sharing, etc. It’s not the word “TEDx” and the slogan “independently organized TED event” that define the movement, but the real actions of thousands upon thousands of volunteers define the movement.

Basically, “performance” means actions. However, the term action is a general word. The term “Performance” is also related to the Stage metaphor.

The Stage metaphor is inspired by the American sociologist Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Goffman viewed theater as a metaphor and developed the dramaturgical analysis method for sociological study. For Goffman, everyday life is a theater.

In fact, I use the Mind as Play as a metaphor to understand everyday cognitive activities. Now we can use a similar metaphor to understand everyday life performance.

The difference between my approach and Goffman’s approach is that I can use the Mind as Play metaphor and the Stage metaphor together. It means a person’s Life Performance is both an object of his own mind and others’ minds. While Goffman emphasizes Impression Management which refers to influencing others’ mind, I emphasize Reflective Management which refers to managing one’s own mind.

In addition, I want to mention Fred Newman’s cultural-performatory approach and Social Therapy. Fred Newman and Lois Holzman read Lev Vygotsky from their own perspective and they adopt Vygotsky’s idea about play as a core for their approach. You can find a draft chapter titled Activity and Performance in Social Therapeutic Method on their website. The below three pieces are samples of their ideas.

Developmental psychology tends to relate to culture in one of two ways. Within the broad mainstream of the discipline, culture is considered to be a factor in human development, that is, something that influences the developmental process. Within constructionist and cultural-historical psychology, development is cultural, in that what it means for children to develop is that they adopt (“appropriate”) the culture that they are born in to. My own perspective is that human development consists of both the appropriating and the creating of culture, and that their dialectic interplay is what is most interesting and relevant to understand. That is one way I see the social therapeutic activity of transforming narrative into performance.
This kind of play (and, thereby, learning in early childhood) is performatory, that is, non-didactic, non-cognitively based, and non-individuated. Fifteen-month olds who do not yet know the language of their family perform as speakers of it; two-year olds who are not literate perform as readers; three-year olds who know nothing of perspective or representation perform as artists. The performatory zpd supports them doing things they don’t yet know how to do; it activates what Vygotsky referred to as “the child’s potential to move from what he is able to do to what he is not” (Vygotsky 1987, p. 212). In the performatory zpd children develop because they are both who they are and beyond, or other than, who they are at the same time. This is akin to Vygotsky’s notion that play is developmental for children because it is when they act as if “a head taller” (Vygotsky 1978, p. 102). Perhaps the collective form of working together in early childhood is better identified as a collective form of playing together. It is a playing together in which culture (i.e., the “stage” and the performance) is created and simultaneously appropriated.
Within a performatory (as opposed to a cognitive) modality (community), we (social therapy/social therapists) seek to help create a pointless dialectical (a mixture of Plato’s and Marx’s) group conversation (a conversation oriented toward discovery/creation) in order to generate a new game (a Wittgensteinian game) which completes (in a Vygotskian sense) the thinking, and is itself (by magic, a.k.a. art) a performance (though more activity than an action). (p. 229)

Fred Newman and Lois Holzman consider Lev Vygotsky as a Revolutionary Scientist in their 1993 book Lev Vygotsky: Revolutionary Scientist.

15. Opportunity > Life Discovery

For the D as Diagramming framework, I used “Ecological Situation” as a practical perspective (1, 2).

For discussing Strategy, I use “Strategic Awareness” to refer to perceiving opportunities by sense-making on changes in environments.

For the “Life” thematic space, I’d like to use “Life Discovery” as a practical perspective.

In fact, my “Opportunity” thematic space contains the Ecological Practice approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology and other social practice theories. In order to explain the value of the ecological practice approach, I adopt the concept of Opportunity as mediation and redefined it as formula below:

Opportunity = From a perspective (X), You (U) could do things (Y) with an object (Z).

This formula requires more details than the above two aspects. I add perspective and object to the formula.

This is a heuristic tool for connecting Theory (the ecological practice approach) and Practice (the real-life actions). In this way, I can apply the concept of Affordance and other theoretical concepts as Perspectives to the formula. You can find more details about the formula here: D as Diagramming: The Opportunity Formula.

The Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0) also offers a multiple perspectives package for the Life Discovery Activity.

16. The Order of Life

Where is the starting point of the process of theorizing something?

For my “Life” thematic space, the starting point is the pair of concepts of “Lifeway/Lifeform” which were coined in 2018.

In Oct 2018, I started writing Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice. Chapter 5 of the book is titled “Curativity” and I defined it as a curated transformation between individual life experience and collective sociocultural practice. In fact, the chapter offers a framework for applying Curativity Theory to discussing the “experience — culture” curation. Let’s call it the Curativity Framework.

I used the above diagram to visualize the Curativity Framework. Basically, I defined two layers and discussed the curated transformation from six dimensions.

Actificial layer: individual daily life experience.
Artificial layer: collective social culture of practice.

Why did I set these two layers? Because I adopted ecological psychology as my starting point. Ecological Psychology is about individual daily life experiences. So, I used Ecological Psychology to understand the Actificial layer. For the Artificial layer, I adopt Activity Theory and other social practice theories.

This is the initial version of the Ecological Practice approach.

The pair of concepts of “Lifeway — Lifeform” is part of the Curativity Framework. I used them to discuss the Order of Life at different two levels:

Lifeway: concrete, immediate, situated, without language-based representation.
Lifeform: abstract, non-situated, with language-based representation.

A major difference between Lifeway and Lifeform is language-based representation. For Lifeway, we don’t have words or terms for them because we don’t need them. For Lifeform, we have words or terms for them.

The names of “Lifeway — Lifeform” were inspired by Erik Rietveld and Kiverstein’s 2014 paper A Rich Landscape of Affordance. The authors suggest a new theoretical account of Affordances. Their starting point is the term “way of life” which is used by Gibson in his book.

Gibson (1979/1986) made the connection between an animal’s niche and its way of life in the following passage:

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. (p. 128)

The authors used “way of life” to build their theoretical account.

We take seriously Gibson’s (1979/1986) ideas that one and the same material environment can offer “many ways of life” and that each type or species of animal enacts a unique way of life.
We take Gibson’s idea of an animal’s “way of life” to be the proper starting point for a theory of affordances. He makes it clear that the affordances the environment offers to a particular kind of animal depend on this animal’s way of life.
However, in the human case the concept of a way of life is ambiguous. It can mean the human way of life in general but also the different practices to be found in different cultures.
Gibson’s concept of a way of life helps us to make sense of the variety of affordances that show up for different species because of differences in how they live.
However, to understand the variety of practices within the human way of life we find it helpful to introduce a different concept. We borrow the notion of form of life from the writings of Wittgenstein to help us deal with this conceptual challenge.

The authors point out that there are three ways of understanding the notion of form of life:

The flexibility that the notion of a ‘form of life’ offers, allows us to capture the variety of practices within the human way of life. It can be understood on at least three grains of analysis:
the human form of life in general (as contrasted with other kinds of animals),
a particular socio-cultural practice (i.e. regularities in the sitting behavior of New Yorkers) and
finally, the particular engagement with affordances of individuals that we see when we zoom in on this practice at a more detailed level of analysis.
It is this straddling of different grains of analysis that makes the notion of ‘form of life’ well suited for using it in a definition of affordances (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).

The authors suggest that there are two levels of affordance analysis:

Level 1: The form of life and the patterns of behavior that make it up (a form of life in which individuals have the potential to engage with affordances skilfully); and
Level 2: A particular individual’s actual skilled engagement with an affordance (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).

Level 1 is similar to my notion of “Artificial layer (collective social culture of practice)” while Level 2 is similar to my notion of “Actificial layer (individual daily life experience).

Then, the authors offer their theoretical account of Affordances:

We argue that the existence of affordances is not dependent on the actual engagement with an affordance by any particular individual, but affordances nevertheless have an existence that is relative to a form of life (Rietveld and Kiverstein 2014).

I personally use the “Zoom-in/Zoom-out” hybrid approach for Affordance Analysis. The authors remove the “Zoom-in” view which is Gibson’s original account.

Inspired by the authors’ method, I coined two new terms for the Curativity framework:

Lifeway: inspired by Gibson’s term “way of life”.
Lifeform: inspired by Wittgenstein’s term “form of life”.

However, my account is different from the authors’ account because what I am developing is a theory of Curativity. In other words, I didn’t want to develop a new theory of Affordance. I wanted to connect Affordance theory, Activity Theory, and other social practice theories.

The core of the Curativity framework is the curated transformation between Lifeway and Lifeform. This curated transformation refers to at least the following three things:

creative actions
perception of creative actions
the conception of perception of creative actions

This is what I called the Epistemology of Curation. Traditionally, researchers tend to use “perception, conception, and action” as three keywords to discuss mind-related topics. From the perspective of Curativity Theory which is about turning pieces into a meaningful whole, I want to expand the foundation of mind-related topics from three keywords to four keywords.

The Epistemology of Curation refers to considering pieces of perceiving experience, pieces of concepts, pieces of actions at a level and moving to a higher level to curate these pieces into a meaningful whole.

Also, I also pointed out that the top-down approach of the “Lifeway — Lifeform” relationship. The curated transformation can be accepting normativity from collective culture practice to individual life experience.

So, the Curativity framework is not a theory of creativity, but a theory of Possible Practice.

You can find more details about Possible Practice here.

The initial version of the Ecological Practice approach defined several foundational concepts of a theory about Possible Practice. Later, I developed some new concepts such as Attachance, Supportance, Infoniche for the Ecological Practice approach.

This is a long journey of searching for the Order of Life.

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