Thematic Space: Place as Container

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13 min readJan 14, 2022

Model is an Abstract Container while Story is a Concrete Container

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 a canvas in the following articles:

I also used a metaphor to discuss the context of Developing Tacit Knowledge.

Today I am going to talk about the Floor Plan metaphor: Place as Container. This article aims to answer a question: Where is a thematic space?

The Context of Developing Tacit Knowledge

In order to understand the relationship between Thematic Spaces and Developing Tacit Knowledge, I used a metaphor to discuss the context of life development: Flow, Film, and Floor Plan.

Experience > Flow > Life as a continuous flow
Story > Film > Project as a film with a prominent theme
Model > Floor Plan > Thematic space as a floor plan

The diagram below offers a landscape view of these three-layer structure.

You can find more details from the original article: Thematic Space: Flow, Film, and Floor Plan.

Model: Thematic Space as a floor plan

I use Floor Plan as a metaphor for the Model layer because it refers to three connected notions:

Floor Plan: a cognitive representation of the structure of a house
House: a physical place which contains a family
Home: a social place which contains life activities of a family

Now we can translate this metaphor to discuss Thematic Space:

Floor Plan > Thematic Space: a cognitive representation of the structure of Tacit Knowing Space.
House > Physical Environments: computer, website, physical whiteboard, etc. These physical environments are places which contain the Canvas of Thematic Space and a person’s Tacit Knowing Activities.
Home > Social Environments: conversations, meetings, workshops, family, school, company, etc. These social environments are places which contain a person’s Tacit Knowing Activities.

I have discussed these topics and diagrams in old articles, you find more details from here and here.

A model is not a reality, but by modeling reality, we have a special way of knowing. By using models, a person could explore the knowing of Analysis. For example, I used the canvas of Thematic Space to review my “Activity” thematic space. The process, the result, and the value are totally different from the Story layer.

Where are Thematic Spaces?

The above “Floor Plan / House / Home” metaphor is quoted from the original article. It offers an answer to this question.

Today I am going to provide a new answer from the perspective of Curativity Theory. In this way, we can detach our discussions from metaphor-based thinking and attach it to theory-based thinking.

Curativity Theory is a sub-theory of my work the Ecological Practice approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology and other theoretical resources.

I have worked in the curation field for over ten years. I was the Chief Information Architect of BagTheWeb.com which was an early tool for content curation (We launched the site in 2010). This experience inspired me to make a long term commitment to the Curation theme. After having 10 years of various curation-related practical work experience and theory learning, I coined a term called Curativity and developed Curativity Theory which became a book.

The core idea of Curativity Theory is very simple:

In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need Container as part to contain pieces and shape them.

The theory built a brand new ontology called “Whole, Piece and Part” and adopted James Gibson’s “Affordance”, George Lakoff’s “Container” and Donald Schön’s “Reflection” as epistemological tools. To test the theory, I wrote several case studies and one of them is titled Knowledge Curation.

In philosophy and mathematical logic, researchers use “mereology” to describe the study of parts and the whole they form. Though I am also talking about the relationship between the pieces and whole, what I want to explore is not mereology. My objective is “curating pieces into a meaningful whole” which refers to action, experience, and value. In other words, I care about the practice and activity of curating, not the abstract thinking about parts and wholes.

Thus, I coined a new term Curativity to describe my objective. The diagram below shows the third element of Curativity: Container. The basic assumption behind the diagram and the new term is: “In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need Container to contain pieces and shape them.”

Pieces, Container and Whole together form a triad which is the basic unit of analysis of Curativity theory. Also, this unit of analysis establishes a new theoretical category at the ontological level. The concept of Curativity indicates to three statuses of things:

Things-in-Pieces
Things-in-Container
Things-in-Whole

Curativity theory is all about understanding the structure and dynamics of these three statuses.

Developing Tacit Knowledge as Knowledge Curation

In order to apply Curativity Theory to our present discussion, we need to build some connections. First connection is claiming Developing Tacit Knowledge as Knowledge Curation.

In the above discussion, I also use the term “Tacit Knowing Activities” which defines “Developing Tacit Knowledge” as “Activity”. Now, we can further define it as a special type of Activity: Knowledge Curation. Thus, we can use both Activity Theory and Curativity Theory for our discussions. However, Activity Theory doesn’t have rich conceptual resources for discussing environments. So, this article will focus on Curativity Theory.

The second connection is defining the basic unit of Developing Tacit Knowledge with the “pieces-whole-container” triad.

Things-in-Pieces: Sparks inspired by daily life experience.
Things-in-Whole: Knowledge products.
Things-in-Container: ?

I use “Sparks” to describe the basic unit of tacit knowledge. This is a metaphor too. If we need an academic concept, I’d like to adopt the term “mental elements” from Dean Keith Simonton’s Chance-configuration theory (Scientific Genius,1988). What’s mental elements? According to Simonton, “In scientific creativity, the predominant mental elements are cognitions of some kind, such as facts, principles, relations, rules, laws, formulae, and images. Yet immediate sensations may also play a role in laboratory experimentation and field exploration, and feelings may figure in scientific thought and discourse as well (Mahoney 1976). Sometimes these mental elements can be evoked voluntarily (e.g., the deliberate retrieval of a stored fact from memory); at other times these elements enter mental processing involuntarily (e.g., via a conditioned emotional association). Moreover, these mental elements do not have to be fully conscious, but rather, many enter information processing at the periphery of consciousness. ” (1988, p.6)

I highlight some keywords from Simonton’s description about mental elements. It looks like this is a rough definition. And, it is very hard to give an accurate definition for such things. Thus, I think the “Sparks” metaphor is fine for our present discussion.

I have mentioned that there is the Enter — Exit dimension behind the canvas of Thematic Space. For the Knowledge Curation project, the Enter is related to Resources and the Exit is related to Results. There are two types of Results for Developing Tacit Knowledge: End and Means. The End refers to “Knowing for Me” while the Means refers to “Knowing for All”. The “Knowing for Me” and “Knowing for All” are two types of motivations, the former is developing knowledge for public benefit while the latter is developing knowledge for personal practice.

I use the term Knowledge Products to discuss the Results of Knowledge Curation. Since there are two types of motivations and many types of situations, there are various forms of Knowledge Products. The value of the term is using the metaphor of Produce Activity.

The final issue is the Things-in-Container. According to Curativity Theory, this refers to various types of Environments or Places.

Things-in-Containers

The concept of Container is inspired by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment.

According to Mark Johnson (1987), “If we look for common structure in our many experiences of being in something, or for locating something within another thing, we find recurring organization of structures: the experiential basis for in-out orientation is that of spatial boundedness. The most experientially salient sense of boundedness seems to be that of three-dimensional containment (i.e., being limited or held within some three-dimensional enclosure, such as a womb, a crib, or a room).” He also pointed out there are at least five important entailments or consequences of these recurring experiential image-schematic structures for in-out orientation. (pp.21–22)

Why did I adopt conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment since I already have the affordance of container? Because Gibson’s affordance is only suitable for discussing physical things. For abstract non-physical things, I can use conceptual metaphor Container and image schema Containment.

Moreover, physical containers and non-physical containers can work together in order to explain complex curating activity. For example, the picture below shows a scene of playing. In Feb 2020, my two sons played a rock game outdoor. From the perspective of Curativity theory, there are three containers, 1) the land (physical environments as containers), 2) the rock-man picture (mental structures as containers), and 3) the game (social activities as containers).

Another example is the picture below which shows two wood blocks. Here we see two containers, one is the desktop (physical container) and another is the word “AI”(linguistic container).

The concept of Nested Containers expands the scope of Curativity theory from physical level to non-physical levels.

Curativity theory claims that there are many ways of perceiving and thinking of Things-in-Container in the real world. For example, a typical normal routine practice can be a container for shaping a whole.

Four years ago, I went to Discount Tire to repair tires. I observed their routine work process and found there was a transparent plastic bag which contained my car key and the bill of my case (see the picture below).

My car key and the bill of my case are two things-in-pieces. They connected together through a theme of practice: repairing tires. The company finds a simple way to make a container for containing these two things-in-pieces as a whole for their work flow.

As a normal container, the transparent plastic bag doesn’t make these two things-in-pieces as a whole. In fact, the whole is defined by the routine practice of repairing tires. The bag-in-use provides material function which turns the whole-in-mind into whole-in-environment.

A Sparkling Moment @ House

I’d like to share a real example about Developing Tacit Knowledge. By using this example, we can apply Curativity Theory to discussing Tacit Knowing Activities.

The morning of Jan 2, 2022, I got up at 6:30 am and started curating a bunch of vague thoughts. Why? Because I read many articles about annual reflections and I also watched a talk about life development.

The talk was given by a friend of mine. I have mentioned his story in an old article. He is an ambitious serial entrepreneur with a unique educational background of psychological science. In 2015, he moved to the educational field and started his third business which grew pretty well in the past several years. In the talk, he introduced a brand new theory of human development from the perspective of psychological theories and the perspective of sociological theories.

Also, I designed the Strategist’s Mandala Plus diagram on Jan 1, 2022. The primary theme of the diagram is “Degrees of Freedom” which is a traditional term of strategic thinking. I learned the term from the Japanese strategy consultant Kenichi Ohmae’s writings.

The talk and other people’s real life stories became triggers to me. I thought that it is possible to develop a new mandala diagram called Life Strategy which could adopt the concept of “Degrees of Freedom” for Life Development. So, I worked on the idea that morning.

The picture below was my table. In the beginning, there were no books on the table. I walked to the study room and found a few books, then put them on the table. I repeated it several times.

After sorting some ideas about Life Strategy, Degrees of Freedom, and Life Development, I randomly picked a book and discovered some new ideas. I found the Geneplore model of creative cognition from a book and expanded to a new model which considers Ecological Opportunities. See the picture below.

Then, I moved to something else. Why? I realized that the above diagram is an example of Expandness which is a term I used for the last chapter of Diagram Blending: Building Diagram Network. The term Expandness is part of a group of ideas, see the diagram below.

I used the group of ideas to organize the last chapter of the book. However, I only presented the structure. I did not search and write content for the chapter. The Expanded Geneplore model inspired me to search for more examples for the concept of Expandness. I found other two cases from my own works. Then, I moved to the concept of Attachance and found three cases for it.

I also used four signs to mark papers because they connect to the group of ideas. For me, these signs became a tool for organizing my ideas and these papers. See the pictures below.

This was a sparkling moment at my house. I didn’t use my iPhone and Internet that morning. So, Things-in-Containers are physical environments. Rooms, the table, pens, books, papers, these things are all physical.

Where were my sparks? They were born from a Place which is formed by these physical things and environments.

Also, they were recorded as diagrams and notes in A4s-size papers. Now we see two types of important containers:

Diagrams: Abstract Containers of Sparks.
Papers: Concrete Containers of Sparks.

Why these two types of containers — Abstract Containers and Concrete Containers — are important for Developing Tacit Knowledge? Because Sparks are not graspable. Curativity Theory calls this Double Containers Principle.

Story and Model

Story and Model are two types of containers too. If we put them together, then one is Abstract Container and the other one is Concrete Container.

Curativity Theory adopts the Construal Level Theory (CLT) to evaluate the degrees of abstraction of containers. CLT is a psychological theory that describes the relation between psychological distance and the extent to which people’s thinking is abstract or concrete.

Yaacov Trope and Nira Liberman pointed out in their article Construal-Level Theory of Psychological Distance, “According to CLT, then, people traverse different psychological distances by using similar mental construal processes. Because the various distances have the same egocentric reference point, they should all be cognitively related to each other and similarly affect and be affected by level of construal. As psychological distance increases, construals would become more abstract, and as level of abstraction increases, so too would the psychological distances people envisage. Construal levels thus expand and contract one’s mental horizon.”

The three-layer structure of context of Developing Tacit Knowledge represents three level of abstraction. If we only talk about the Story layer and the Model layer, then Story is a Concrete Container while Model is an Abstract Container.

Where is the “Thematic Space”?

The term “Thematic Space” refers to a notion, a canvas, and related diagrams and articles. We can understand it as a knowledge and identify related containers:

Notion/Concept: Abstract Containers
Canvas/Article: Concrete Containers

We can also identify Medium.com as a concrete container of my diagrams and articles. We can also identify Chrome as a concrete container of Medium. We can also identify my iMac as a concrete container of Chrome. We can also identify my house as a concrete container of my iMac… so on.

Where is a “thematic space”?

The term “thematic space” refers to a particular thematic space. For example, my “Activity” thematic space.

Where is my “Activity” thematic space?It is part of my personal journey of epistemic development which is part of my life as a continuous flow.

My Life as a continuous flow: Abstract Container
My journey of Epistemic Development: Abstract Container
My epistemological framework: Concrete Container (see the diagram below)

An article about mapping my “Activity” thematic space: Concrete Container.

What’s next?

How about turning the article about mapping my “Activity” thematic space into a book titled Appropriating Activity Theory?

How about an offline exhibition titled Life as Activity?

A Journey of Continuous Discovery

Developing Tacit Knowledge is a journey of continuous discovery. A creative person tends to find more and more abstract containers and concrete containers.

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

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