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Mental Moves #7: Mental Focus and Moving between Thematic Spaces

Oliver Ding
CALL4
Published in
16 min readJun 17, 2023

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Mental Moves without Mental Elements

This post is part of the Mental Moves knowledge project that aims to collect related articles about the concept of “Attachance” and more examples about “Moving between Thematic Spaces” in order to edit a book. You can find more details in the following links:

I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 to discuss some ideas related to Affordance, a core idea of Ecological Psychology.

In 2022, the development of Attachance was tied to the development of Thematic Space which refers to a specific type of container: cognitive container. You can find more details in [Slow Cognition] The Development of the concept of “Thematic Spaces”.

On March 10, 2023, I wrote a short post about the development of “Attachance” on Linkedin. On March 24, 2023, I collected a set of articles about the concept of “Attachance” and “Moving between Thematic Spaces”.

The Concept of Attachance (A list of articles)

I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 to discuss some ideas related to Affordance, a core…

medium.com

I also launched a board for the Mental Moves knowledge project on Milanote.

The Mental Moves knowledge project started with the concept of “Mental Elements” which is adopted from Dean Keith Simonton’s Chance-configuration theory.

In a previous article titled Creative Action: The Attachance of Moving Mental Elements, I developed the model below for case studies.

Each project corresponds to a thematic space.

  • Each project is supported by a digital platform.
  • A mental element can move between two thematic spaces.

You can find some case studies in Creative Action: The Attachance of Moving Mental Elements, Mental Moves #1: The Transformation of Mental Elements, and Mental Moves #2: Creative Swapping of Mental Elements.

In Mental Moves #6: Mental Models and the Attachance of Multiple Moves, I also introduce Knowledge Frameworks, Mental Models, and Multiple Moves.

Now it’s time to look at the landscape of Mental Moves and rethink the whole project.

A Typology of Mental Moves

In order to design a structure of a possible book for the Mental Moves knowledge project, I developed a simple typology of Mental Moves:

  • Type 1: A Single Mental Element moves between different thematic spaces.
  • Type 2: Multiple Mental Elements move between different thematic spaces.
  • Type 3: Mental Moves without Mental Elements

Our previous discussions have covered Type 1 and Type 2, now we can move to Type 3.

This decision detached my mind from our original plan for the project. The above typology is a new plan for the project. In other words, I attached my mind to the new plan.

I have roughly used “my mind” or “my focus” for describing the same type of mental move. Inspired by the “Life Coordinate” framework (v2), I decided to use the term “Mental Focus” for the Mental Moves project.

The Life Coordinate Framework

The “Life Coordinate” framework (v2) aims to highlight two tendencies of life development: Horizontal Tendency and Vertical Tendency. See the diagram below.

I use the basic model of the Ecological Practice approach for the Horizontal Tendency.

If we repeat the above basic model, we see a Lifeflow which is the short name of a metaphor “Life as a continuous flow”.

I use “continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought”.

James used a group of metaphors around the notion of “Stream of Thought”. According to Jeffrey V. Osowski, the following other metaphors or images were part of the stream family (1989, p.132): train, chain, path, current (both water and electric), channel, line (with segments), procession, kaleidoscope, and fabric. “By using these metaphors, James was able to capture the concepts of continuity, constant change, direction, connectedness, pace, rhythm, and flow, all of which were important characteristics of thought or consciousness.”

James used the stream metaphor to reject the British empiricists’ view of consciousness which refers to the chain or train metaphor. According to James:

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness or of subjective life. (vol. 1, p.239)

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. Since a container has its boundary, then we have experience of Enter and Exit. If we consider Life as a large container as a whole, Enter refers to Birth and Exit refers to Death. We can also consider Birth as a small life event, its primary life container is the Womb. Death, its primary life container is the Tomb.

The concept of Container is adopted from George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment. However, I expanded the concept from a metaphor to a theoretical concept for the Ecological Practice approach. I use “Attach” and “Detach” to describe these experiences and other meanings.

For life development, what I want to claim is the meaning of “Attach something to containers” and “Detach something from containers”. This is not part of the conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment.

By expanding to “Attach something to containers” and “Detach something from containers”, we can talk about something. In this way, Life is not only a purely spiritual journey but a social material activity too. In other words, mind and matter are not separable.

You can find more details in the following links:

I used Lifechain to name the Vertical Tendency for the “Life Coordinate”. It uses “chain” to understand the chain of actions. From the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach, the primary aspect of the “Subject — Object” relationship is the transformation between Potential (action opportunities) and Actual (actions).

In this way, I used “Subject — Potential(Actual) — Object” to replace Activity Theory’s “Subject — Mediatopm — Object”. Since the pair of concepts “Subject-Object” is commonly used in social science, I can cut the weak link between Life Coordinate and Activity Theory.

Moreover, I also used “Focus” to describe “Thing”. The model below is an application of the Ecological Practice approach.

The basic unit of the Ecological Practice approach is the “Person — Thing” interaction and relationship.

  • Potential: the potential possible opportunities that a person could act with a particular thing.
  • Actual: what does a person actually act with the thing? Act 1 and Act 2 refer to two types of acts.
  • Focus: it refers to the thing the person is acting with.

Though the model was developed for the “Product as Thing” theme, it can be applied to the “Life Coordinate” framework (v2.0).

You can find more details in TALE: A Possible theme called “Life Coordinate”.

From Life Focus to Mental Focus

As mentioned above, the concept “Life Focus” refers to the “Subject — Potential(Actual) — Object” schema.

For the Mental Moves knowledge project, we can directly use “Mental Focus” to refer to the “Subject — Potential (Actual) — Object” schema. It means “Moving of Mental Focus” is driven by Potential Action Opportunities.

Also, the concrete mental activities related to “Moving of Mental Focus” can be diverse, such as Perspective Shifting, Attention Switching, Motivational Change, etc.

In this way, we can use the new term “Mental Focus” to describe Type 3 Mental Moves.

  • Perspective Shifting: Moving between different Mental Models and Knowledge Frameworks.
  • Attention Switching: Moving between different actions of a project and between different projects, moving between different parts of a thing and between different things.
  • Motivational Change: Stop working on a project or start a new project.

In this way, I can use Attachance Theory and “Moving between Thematic Spaces” to discuss such mental activities. The rest of the article will use three examples to test this idea.

Example 1: Person as Focus

Let’s start with a simple example. See the picture below.

On May 27, 2023, I visited the Galleria, a shopping center in Houston, with my family. I took the above picture in a store.

I realized that this is a great opportunity to make a case study for Affordance Analysis. So, I asked my sons to play with the door.

Then, I took pictures.

On May 31, 2023, I wrote a post titled Ecological Practice Design: A Tiny Case Study of Affordance Analysis and shared the story.

In the past several years, I spent much time observing my sons’ daily life activities. Eventually, I realized that this is a great way to learn the concept of Affordance.

Some concepts are not observable in the real world. In contrast, you can see other concepts in your daily life. There are many versions of definitions of the concept of Affordance, if you follow Gibson’s original approach, you can see it in your life.

Last week, I discussed the concept of “Affordance” with my sons. Then, I realized that I can invite my son Peiphen to join the Affordance Analysis project as a research fellow of CALl. He can conduct case studies about his own life experiences.

This is a Mental Move of the Affordance Analysis project. Peiphen was the Object of the project before the mental move. Now he is a Subject of the project.

The “Object — Subject” Mental Move refers to a special type of Attachance.

Example 2: Problem as Focus

Two years ago, I wrote an article titled Possible Practices: Attach, Detach, and Opportunities which was inspired by a Twitter chat about career development and the Attachance perspective.

In May 2021, I moved to a new house. I detached my body from an old environment and attached it to a new environment. During several months, we bought various new products and services. This brought me various opportunities of watching local services and find “bugs” in the life world. For example, we added Google Wifi to our house.

Great design!

The only bug is the text “Google Wifi” within this simple one piece of paper which is their self-installation guide.

I followed the guide and searched “Google Wifi” on the Apple Store. However, I couldn’t find it.

What’s the problem? They changed its name to “Google Home”.

This experience encouraged me to reflect on the following issues:

  • How to design a good UX for the Self-Installation Activity?
  • How to manage the Paper-based Activity and the Bit-based activity?
  • What kind of tech news should be considered common sense?

The Attachance perspective emphasizes the value and meaning of the attaching acts and the detaching acts, especially the cross-boundary actions. Later, I made a diagram below to reflect on the above Google Wifi example.

The diagram below is called Career API which describes three types of cognitive domains for career development.

  • A: Agenda of the Times.
  • P: Problems of Domain.
  • I: Personal Issues.

The diagram is made with the Tripartness meta-diagram. The A (Agenda of the Times) is located in the “Organization — Community” zone, the P (Problems of Domain) is located in the “Person — Community” zone, and the I (Personal Issues) is located in the “Person — Organization” zone.

The purpose of the Career API is for discussing career development. If we define Career as a broad concept including non-paid work such as writing this article, then we can use the Career API to discuss my Google Wifi experience.

  • Personal Issues: I can’t find “Google Wifi” on the App Store.
  • Problems of Domain: How to design the Self-installation Activity?
  • Agenda of the Times: What kind of tech news should be considered as common sense?

In 2021, I used “cognitive domains” to describe the Career API diagram.

We should notice that the above three cognitive domains are located in three different zones. In one particular situation, I detached from one cognitive domain and attached to another cognitive domain. It also means I detached from the social role of “customer” and attached to another social role of “researcher”.

This is an example of Attachance.

Now we can use “Thematic Spaces” to replace “Cognitive Domains” for our discussion because the Career API diagram is a knowledge framework.

From the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach, the above three cognitive domains are understood as Containers. Three are three types of containers:

  • Physical Containers
  • Social Containers
  • Cognitive Containers

The real-life world is full of such containers. The above three cognitive domains are cognitive containers. The concept of Attachance can be applied to physical containers and social containers too. For example, the “agency—structure” debate is a major topic of social theories. We can understand the social structure as social containers.

A knowledge framework is a cognitive container. As discussed in previous articles, we can find several thematic spaces in a knowledge framework. In this way, our Mind Focus can move between different thematic spaces when we use a knowledge framework as a map.

On August 11, 2022, I published an article titled “Self-installation Activity” on Activity Analysis Center’s website. In this way, it became a theme for the Activity Analysis project

The “Experience — Theme” Mental Move refers to a special type of Attachance. This is the key to the “Creative Life Curation” method which aims to help people turn experiences into meaningful developmental resources (1, 2, 3).

Example 3: Archetype as Focus

On Dec 13, 2020, I launched the Developmental Project Model. See the diagram below.

From 2020 to 2022, I worked on some case studies about Developmental Projects. After reflecting on these real case studies, I realized that the above diagram is not the only form of the landscape of project engagement.

On Nov 3, 2022, I developed a new model called “Kinds of Project Engagement”. Based on my research and reflection, I discovered the following types of project engagement. I call it Archetypes of Project Engagement. See the diagram below.

This is not a diagram, but a diagram network.

What does this Diagram Network mean?

First, let’s read it from the perspective of visual language.

It refers to seven types of relationships between two triangles. I use the following seven verbs to describe a typology.

  • Contain: the green triangle is contained by the blue triangle
  • Support: the green triangle is supported by the blue triangle
  • Touch: the blue triangle is touched by the green triangle
  • Oppose: the green triangle opposes the blue triangle
  • Combine: the two triangles use the same color
  • Deviate: the two triangles are in different directions
  • Group: the two triangles are grouped together

Second, let’s move to the abstract level which refers to conceptual meanings. Since we are talking about Developmental Projects, we can use the green triangle to refer to a person’s life projects, and the blue triangle can be referred to social contexts.

I use the following seven nouns to describe a new typology:

  • Cultivation: the person’s life project is small and weak, it needs the social context to cultivate it. It looks like a baby and a mom.
  • Acceleration: the person’s life project is big, and the social context offers more resources to support its development. It looks like a startup and its inventor.
  • Reference: the person’s life project doesn’t have a strong link with the social context. However, the social context can be a reference to the project. For example, I don’t have a direct interpersonal relationship with Robert Kegan who is an American developmental psychologist. I only read his books and papers.
  • Confliction: there are tensions or contradictions between the person’s life project and the social context. For example, a person doesn’t like his job.
  • Integration: the person’s life project and the social context are perceived as a meaningful whole and there is no contradiction between them. For example, a startup’s founder and the startup.
  • Departure: the person’s life project and the social context move in different directions. For example, while a founder loves his startup, the investors require the startup to move in a new direction which is not accepted by the founder.
  • Interdependence: the person’s life project and the social context work in the same direction and share the same goals. They need each other in order to achieve a big enterprise.

This is just a heuristic tool. You can add new types or remove some types from the above list for your research or reflection.

Now we can consider each type of developmental project as a thematic space.

And we can find many moves between different types of developmental projects.

We should notice that there are two types of moves:

  • Move between two Developmental Projects which belong to the same type.
  • Move between two Developmental Projects which belong to two different types.

Both moves bring new Attachances to us. Some Attachances are negative while others are positive.

To perceive Attachanes is to perceive moving between thematic spaces. For the Life-as-Project approach, we need to pay attention to both changes in Projects and Types of Projects.

You can find more details in Life Strategy: Kinds of Project Engagement.

What we can learn from this example?

The Life-as-Project approach considers “Project” as the basic unit of analysis. In other words, the approach doesn’t use terms such as “organization”, “community”, “platform”, “ecosystem”, or other terms for the core idea.

The approach considers a person’s life as a chain of projects which are embedded in the chain of social life and collective culture.

The “Kinds of Project Engagement” model gives us a map to discover the potential attachance behind moving between Types of Projects and Particular Projects.

Both Types of Projects and Particular Projects are Thematic Spaces. One is abstract and the other one is concrete.

The “Concrete — Abstract” Mental Move refers to a special type of Attachance.

Conclusion

In 2019, I started working on my own theoretical account of the Ecological Practice approach after finishing a book titled Curativity. The 2019 version of the approach is a curated toolkit version. The concept of Attachance is part of the toolkit. In May 2020, I wrote a book titled After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for expanding ecological psychology to the modern digital environment. The primary theme of After Affordance is the concept of Attachance.

The concept of Attachance is planned to develop as 1) an ecological practice concept for practice studies such as interaction design and startup innovation, and 2) a philosophical concept for developing a social theory.

The book After Affordance only achieves the first goal and it focuses on the following acts:

  • Attaching to an environment
  • Detaching from an environment
  • Attaching to an object
  • Detaching from an object

I use the concept of Attachance in many ways.

The Attachance Perspective refers to its philosophical meaning. You can find more details in D as Diagramming: The Attachance Perspective.

The theoretical concept of “Attachance” for the Ecological Practice Approach. It refers to what I explored in the 2020 book After Affordance. For example, I used it and Affordance together for discussing creative actions. You can find more details in Creative Actions: Second-order Affordance and Attachance.

The word “Attachance” is for normal discussions. I often discuss some stories or topics from the perspective of Attachance. You can find an example in Possible Practices: Attach, Detach, and Opportunities.

Now we have better terms for developing Attachance Theory. “Mental Elements”, “Mental Models”, and “Mental Focus”, are perfect for applying Attachance Theory to discuss cognitive activities.

References

Creative Process
Creativity
Creative Cognition
Ideas
Insights

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Oliver Ding
CALL4

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Founder of CALL(Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.

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