The Life Discovery Canvas (v1.0) — Part 1: Theoretical Background

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15 min readFeb 28, 2022

Six basic principles of the Project-centered approach

A friend of mine visited the Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0)’s Miro board and read some articles about it. She asked me the following question:

“Hey, Oliver! It’s a wonderful toolkit. Can you put all ideas into one A4 sheet?”

Ok, She is asking for a canvas. Originally, I had a plan to design a canvas for the toolkit later. So, I have to change my mind now.

Yesterday I designed the above canvas. If you read my previous articles, you will notice that it looks like the Thematic Space Canvas. Yes, I just made a copy!

The Thematic Space Canvas is developed as an instrument for the activity of “Developing Tacit Knowledge”. I consider the Life Discovery Activity as a special type of “Developing Tacit Knowledge”, so I can use the Thematic Space Canvas for Life Discovery Activity too.

However, the Life Discovery Canvas is not an application of the Thematic Space Canvas. I only adopt the spatial structure from the Thematic Space Canvas for the Life Discovery Canvas. The conceptualization part is based on Life Discovery Toolkit (v1.0), Anticipatory Activity System, Project-oriented Activity Theory, etc.

For me, this canvas is a window of my “Life” thematic space and my “Strategy” thematic space. It is also an invitation to readers for the Life Strategy Project.

The Life Discovery Project is a sub-project of the Life Strategy Project. Though the Life Discovery Canvas is curated by myself, I hope the Life Strategy Project is a co-curation project about the “Life Strategy” theme.

Now I don’t know the meaning of the “Life Strategy” theme, you are going to join the journey of developing collective tacit knowledge about it. If you are interested in, or you know someone who is interested in, please contact me on Linkedin.

I am going to introduce the new canvas and its context with the following four parts:

Part 1: Theoretical Background
Part 2: Spatial Structure
Part 3: Concepts
Part 4: Inspirations

This article is only about Part I and it introduces six basic principles of the Project-centered approach.

Part 1: Theoretical Background

What are the theoretical considerations behind the Life Discovery Toolkit and the Life Discovery Canvas? Why don’t I start with a personality test? Why do I place the term “Project” in the center of the canvas?

Part I offers some theoretical background about the canvas and the toolkit.

1.1 The Project-centered Approach

On Jan 18, 2022, I created the new version of the Project Engagement Toolkit (2022) which is a project-oriented toolkit for theory-based reflection and study. It is a major outcome of the Activity U project because it connected the following two theoretical approaches of Activity Theory together and offers a series of tools for practitioners.

The Activity System Model (Yrjö Engeström, 1987)
Activity as Formation of Concept (Andy Blunden, 2010, 2012, 2014)

Originally, I used “Project Engagement” as the name of Part 3 of the book Project-oriented Activity Theory and it refers to a set of my own ideas for expanding Andy Blunden’s original approach about Project as a unit of analysis of Activity and Activity as Formation of Concept.

In 2021, I moved in the direction of supporting knowledge workers and creators. I realized that the Project Engagement Toolkit has its own significance for practitioners. It is not a pure application of Activity Theory.

In Thematic Space: The Project Engagement Toolkit for Creators, I discussed my “Project” thematic space and highlighted the following three points:

First, the Developmental Project Model is an independent framework.
Second, there is a concept called Projectivity behind the module 4 Zone of Project and the module 5 Developmental Project Model.
Third, I also adopted Howard E. Gruber’s Evolving Systems Approach to the study of Creative Work (1974,1989) for module 6.

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.

On Feb 13, 2022, I published Life Discovery: The Life-as-Project Approach and suggested a strategy for developing a Project-centered approach:

Project as A Multiple Dimension Concept

This simple strategy creates a new thematic space for creative exploratory. I also designed a new diagram that places several pairs of concepts around “Project” in order to develop the Project-centered approach. See the diagram below.

The newest canvas continues the journey and it just places more pairs of concepts on one diagram. Also, the difference between Diagrams and Canvases is the latter focuses on creating spaces for people who want to collect and sort their notes with a framework.

The Project-centered approach is developed with the following six basic principles:

Being by Doing
Engagement as Method
End as Means
Discovery as Development
Performance as Experiment
Curativity as Creativity

Let’s unpack these principles one by one.

1. 2 Being by Doing

The philosophical roots of the Project-centered approach is Activity Theory and Ecological Psychology. 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)

While Activity Theorist emphasizes the mind and self are developed within Activity, Ecological Psychologists focus on the mutual relationship between organism and environment. I personally use the metaphor “Container” to describe both activities and environments.

The above diagram is for discussing the context of Activity Analysis. The Project-centered approach is a new theoretical approach for Activity Analysis. In a broad sense, the Project-centered approach is inspired by the Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky Activity Theories and the American Pragmatism tradition.

I use the slogan “Being by Doing” to highlight the philosophical roots of the Project-centered approach.

The above diagram is my intuitive idea about the slogan “Being by Doing”. It looks like this is a dialogue between Humanistic Psychology and Activity Theory/Ecological Psychology.

Activity Theory/Ecological Psychology: Doing means delivering “Value” as Offers for 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.

I use “Supply — Demand” as a pair of concepts for the Life Discovery Canvas. This is the starting point of the Life Discovery Activity and its canvas.

1.3 Engagement as Method

The method behind the Project-centered approach is “Project Engagement” which is inspired by the Project Engagement Toolkit.

I have developed several frameworks from different perspectives. One challenge is making a balance between individual perspective and collective perspective. In fact, this is an essential challenge of social science. For example, psychological perspective v.s. the sociological perspective, methodological individualism v.s. methodological collectivism, etc.

Some scholars don’t consider the dichotomy as a problem and they just form two camps. Other scholars developed theoretical solutions to solve the theoretical conflict between these two camps. Inspired by Derek Layder’s Social Domains Theory (1997) and Andy Blunden’s “Project as a Unit of Activity” (2010, 2014), I adopted the concept of “Project” as a Container for understanding Life.

Andy Blunden mentions a project-oriented approach is both psychology and sociology, “A project is a focus for 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.” (2014, p.15)

The concept of Life can be understood as Collective Life and Individual Life. We can use the concept of Project to understand both of them. A person’s real life is a set of real actions. The concept of Project is a way of curating these actions. On the other hand, Collective Life can be curated with Projects too.

The term “Engagement” is inspired by Nelson Zagalo’s 2020 book Engagement Design: Designing for Interaction Motivations. While many researchers focus on “User Experience”, Zagalo moves from “Experience” to “Engagement” because “Experience” is too subjective. He proposes a triadic approach to engagement design as a direct answer to the triadic experience — context, subjects, and artifacts — and triadic interaction — know, do and feel — made of three non-hierarchical streams. (Note 1)

What I learned from Zagalo is that experience is too subjective. Activity Theorists reject phenomenology and existentialism which are great theoretical approaches for research user experience. Though Activity Theorists also talk about design and experience, it seems the term “Engagement” is better than “Experience” for Activity Theorists. (Note 2)

According to Blunden, “What distinguishes Activity Theory from Phenomenology and Existentialism is that for Activity Theory, the project has its origin and existence in the societal world in which the person finds themself; for Phenomenology and Existentialism, the psyche projects itself on to the world. For Activity Theory, commitment to a project and formulation of actions towards it is mediated by the psyche, but a project is found and realized as something existing in the world, be that an entire civilization, a single personality, or anything in between. (See MacIntyre, 1981, p.146)” (2014, p.7).

Thus, I use “Project Engagement” as the name of this project in order to highlight the fundamental theoretical aspect of Activity Theory: it is both subjective and objective, also both individual and collective. At least, this is the theoretical commitment of Project-oriented Activity Theory.

Moreover, “Project Engagement” is not only a method for research. In fact, “Engage with Projects” is the essential action of Life Discovery Activity from the Project-centered approach.

1.4 End as Means

The slogan “End as Means” refers to two meanings: 1) the dynamics of ontological position of Objects, and 2) the networked context of Anticipation.

The dynamics of the ontological position of Objects is about the Means-End spectrum. For example, the diagram below is an application of the spectrum.

The above discussion offers a rough typology of diagrams. However, the value of the Means-End Spectrum is highlighting the dynamics of the ontological position of diagrams because it matches the dynamics of thoughts. Though even the above discussion is about diagrams, we can replace Diagrams with other things and turn the Means-End Spectrum into a general framework.

For example, the Life Discovery Activity focuses on 1) Detecting Potential Contradictions and 2) Exploring Potential Themes in order to enhance a person’s life development. In order to cope with potential contradictions, we need to adopt Objects as Means for solving problems. In order to develop potential themes, we need to adopt Objects as End as creative spaces.

The second meaning of “End as Means” refers to the networked context of Anticipation. From the perspective of the Project-centered approach, we can understand the real-life world as a connected Project Network. One End of a project could be a Means of another project. I have discussed this issue in Life Discovery: The “Means-End” Spectrum and Becoming.

1.5 Discovery as Development

Life Discovery is not only for Life Transitions. Life Discovery is for both settled life stages and unsettled life stages. The diagram is built with a metaphor that suggests a three-layer structure for understanding the context of Developing Tacit Knowledge. In fact, this is also the context of Life Discovery Activity.

I use “continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought”. What James emphasized is the Subjective Life. I follow this metaphor and directly use Life as a continuous flow to describe a person’s subjective experience of his own life. You can’t use a knife to cut a stream, you only can use a container to contain it.

The water doesn’t have a form which also means a structure, but the container has a form. The form of our experience is perceived as an interaction between our immediate actions with ecological situations which refers to physical environments and social environments.

The Life Discovery Canvas is a model, it is generated from Stories and Projects. Development is a process of continuous flow. Life Discovery is a meta-project of Life Discovery.

1.6 Performance as Experiment

The primary challenge of Life Development is the “Present — Future” Dynamics. From the perspective of the Anticipatory Activity System, this issue is understood as the “Anticipation — Performance” Complexity. See the diagram below.

Anticipation refers to an Objective that is about the future while Performance refers to an Object which is about present work. The Project-centered approach considers Performance as an Experiment for testing Anticipation.

From the perspective of the Anticipatory Activity System, Performance belongs to both First-order Activity (producing Results) and Second-order Activity (modifying Objectives).

1.7 Curativity as Creativity

Life is a real practice. How do we apply various theoretical knowledge to such a practice?

This question leads to a significant gap between Theory and Practice. Knowledge heroes create various theories, frameworks, models, etc. Their creativity drives them to make unique and general ideas. Eventually, they build a highly fragmented knowledge ecology that is not accessible to ordinary people.

In 2019 I developed Curativity Theory for understanding general curation practice and wrote a book. In 2020, I started the Knowledge Curation project which aims to apply Curativity Theory to connect Theory and Practice. From the perspective of Curativity Theory, ordinary people need to add “Curation” to develop their minds.

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.

For Life Discovery, this theoretical consideration leads to two meanings: 1) we can adopt Multiple Perspectives to understand One Thing, and 2) we can adopt One Perspective to understand a Group of Things.

This article is part of the Life Strategy project. 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 use a dialogue knowledge curation approach to develop the Life Strategy project. While I am applying the Anticipatory Activity System framework and the Project-center approach to the Life Discovery project, I am also using the project to test these two theoretical approaches.

You can find the Life Discovery Toolkit and the canvas on the following board on Miro:

The Life Discovery Toolkit

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miro.com

Below is a list of related articles:

For the Project Engagement approach, you can visit the Activity Analysis website to find more relevant information about Activity Theory.

For the Anticipatory Activity System framework, you can read Strategy as Anticipatory Activity System and its early version iART Framework.

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

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverding
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oliverding
Polywork: https://www.polywork.com/oliverding
Boardle: https://www.boardle.io/users/oliver-ding

Note 1

According to Zagalo, “Engagement has been a topic of debate over the past decade in different domains, from Education (Antonetti & Garver, 2015 ; Butin & Seider, 2012 ; Moore, 2013 ) to Management (Rothmann, 2016 ; Saks, 2019 ; Seijts & Crim, 2006 ) and Marketing (Brodie, Hollebeek, Juri´c, & Ili´c, 2011 ; Harmeling, Moffett, Arnold, & Carlson, 2017 ), and particularly with the emergence of social media (Harrigan, Evers, Miles,& Daly, 2017 ; Hollebeek, Glynn, & Brodie, 2014 ; Voorveld, van Noort, Muntinga, & Bronner, 2018 ). There has been an interest in understanding how engagement occurs, not only in how it produces meaning but in how it affects behaviour and through which patterns. However, as we have already seen, an enormous barrier of subjectivity inhibits it. If we followed through communication pragmatics, focused on meaning-making, with Watzlawick (e.g. “axioms of communication”), we would be completely captive to subjectivity, context-dependent, with every case being a case, on its own and belonging to no general category. At the other end of the spectrum, we could follow with the recent cutting-edge digital tools of marketing, which by defining itself within a fully persuasive environment immersed in digital data, registering the entire relations continuously, has crafted a set of clear formulas (numbers of clicks, likes, comments, shares, views, etc.) to calculate behavioural change: the engagement.We must, however, curb this approach in the interest of our research, in the sense that all this quantitative data is merely indicative and often misleading in the analysis (e.g. a campaign will not always be shared for the best reasons — it may contain a whole negative charge — but of course in the restricted area of marketing we know that no negative publicity exists).” (2020, p.19)

Note 2

According to HCI Activity Theorist Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi, “…there are deep conceptual similarities between activity theory and phenomenology. Like other post-cognitivist theories such as distributed cognition (e.g., Hollan et al., 2000)” and actor-network theory (e.g., Callon, 1986), they are highly critical of Cartesian mind-body dualism and maintain that there is a fundamental unity of the mind and the world. Another basic idea shared by most post-cognitivist theories is that technology plays a vital role in human life. In addition, both activity theory (Leontiev’s version) and phenomenology, as opposed to some other post-cognitivist theories, are primarily interested in individual subjects…One more common feature of activity theory and phenomenology is that they both describe subjective experience in terms of meaning.” (2012, p.50)

However, there are significant differences between these two theoretical traditions. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi point out, “A substantial different between activity theory and phenomenology lies in their respective conceptual points of departure. Activity theory understands subjects as constituted by their inherently social activities that transform both subjects and the world (objects). Activities, therefore, set subjects apart and, at the same time, relate them to the world. Since subjects have need-based agency and become what they are through their socially and physically distributed activities, a detailed account of motivation, development, and social-cultural context is a necessary precondition for understanding subjects, their ‘acting — in — the world’.” (2012, p.51)

Now let’s look at the essential aspect of phenomenology. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi say, “In phenomenology, subjects are also assumed to be one with the world — their very existence is defined as ‘’being — in — world’ (Heidegger, 1962). However, the most fundamental issue to be explored is formulated in phenomenology in terms of how people make sense of their existence and how the world reveals itself to subjects. The issue of how subjects come to exist in the first place is not systematically analyzed, and neither are the specific needs and goals underlying the active, engaged nature of ‘being — in — the — world.’ In addition, while the importance of the social context was recognized (and reflected), for instance in the Heidegger’s notion of ‘being with,’ which was mentioned, but not elaborated upon (Polt, 1999), it did not become a central issue in the phenomenological tradition until the notion of intersubjectivity was introduced to phenomenology discourse (see Dourish, 2001). ”(2012, p.51)

References

Andy Blunden (2014) Collaborative Project: An interdisciplinary study. Brill.

Engeström, Y. (1987) Learning by Expanding: An Activity-Theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Helsinki: Orienta-Konsultit Oy.

Kaptelinin V., & Nardi B. (2012) Activity theory in HCI: fundamentals and reflections. Morgan & Claypool Publishers.

Nelson Zagalo (2020) Engagement Design: Designing for Interaction Motivations. Springer.