Thematic Space: The Project Engagement Toolkit for Creators

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12 min readJan 19, 2022

An Example of “Toolkit as Knowledge Statue” and possible connections between two thematic spaces

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 Jan 9, 2022, I used my “Activity” thematic space as an example to discuss the eight dimensions of thematic spaces. I also considered the example as a case study of Developing Tacit Knowledge.

Yesterday I shared a Story about the Activity U project (phase II) which could be considered as a new result of my “Activity” thematic space. The core of the Activity U project (phase II) is a new website called Activity Analysis.

Today I am going to share another one result of my “Activity” thematic space: The Project Engagement Toolkit. It was inspired by Project-oriented Activity Theory. Now it connects to a new thematic space: the “Project” thematic space.

In Thematic Space: Sparks In, Statue Out, I used the Statue metaphor to describe knowledge products and results of Developing Tacit Knowledge. Following the metaphor, I consider the Project Engagement Toolkit as an example of Knowledge Statues.

This article also aims to show possible connections between two thematic spaces. Today I just want to share a particular example. From this example, we can explore more possible connections between more thematic spaces later.

Toolkit as a Knowledge Statue

From the perspective of Knowledge Curation, a single tacit knowing activity can be understood as the following metaphor:

Attach with many Sparks (Pieces)
Detach with one Statue (Whole)

I use “Sparks” to describe the basic unit of tacit knowledge. This is a metaphor. I use “Statues” to describe the basic forms of explicit knowledge. This is a metaphor too. You can find more details in Thematic Space: Sparks In, Statue Out.

Today I want to talk about “Toolkit” which is a special type of form of explicit knowledge. Also, I will use the Project Engagement Toolkit as an example.

I learned the term “Toolkit approach” from practice studies theorist Davide Nicolini’s book Practice Theory, Work, & Organization (2013). Since 2001, a group of philosophers, sociologists and scientists have rediscovered the practice perspective and used it as a lens to explore and examine the role of practices in human activity. Researchers called it The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. As Schatzki pointed out, “there is no unified practice approach”(2001, p.2). Davide Nicolini adopted a way of toolkit to introduce the following six different ways of theorizing practice in his book:

Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu
Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
Activity Theory / Cultural-historical activity theory (the Marxian/Vygotskian/Leont’evian tradition)
Ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, 1954)
The Site of Social (contemporary developments of the Heideggerian/Wittgensteinian traditions, by Theodore R. Schatzki)
Conversation Analysis / Critical Discourse Analysis (the Foucauldian tradition)

Nicolini also pointed out, “Practice theories are fundamentally ontological projects in the sense that they attempt to provide a new vocabulary to describe the world and to populate the world with specific ‘units of analysis’; that is, practice. How these units are defined, however, is internal to each of the theories, and choosing one of them would thus amount to reducing the richness provided by the different approaches.” (2012, p.9)

In order to offer a practical framework for readers, Nicolini curated a theory-method package. He said, “To study and represent practices, we need a coherent theory-method package that allows us to do three things. First it needs to help us in building or slicing the social world in terms of practices instead of, say, systems or classes or rational economic actors…Second, the theory-method package must also help us to re-present practice in the text…Third, as suggested above, the theory-method package needs to be articulative and not eliminativist. In this sense, it has to offer resources for building narratives and for plotting the world, not readymade plots to be stitched upon ‘phenomena’. A theory-method package that remains authentic to the criteria endorsed above should therefore offer a discursive repertoire or infra-language (Latour 2005) open enough so that it can be used to construct specific local stories, explanations, and further theories.” (2021, p.218)

The theory-method package is a set of sensitizing concepts/questions. Nocolini identified the following concepts (2012, p.220):

Sayings and doings
Interactional order
Timing and tempo
Bodily choreography
Tools, artifacts, and mediation work
Practical concerns
Tension between creativity and normativity
Processes of legitimation and stabilization

From the perspective of the Knowledge Curation framework, these sensitizing concepts connect to several Thematic Spaces. If a person wants to adopt the toolkit, she has to establish these thematic spaces in order to develop tacit knowledge about these concepts.

The key of building a toolkit is curating various concepts from different theoretical approaches based on a family relationship, allowing a network of dissimilarities and similarities. In the past years, I have built the following three toolkits.

The Ecological Practice Approach Toolkit (2019)
The Life-as-Activity Approach (v0.3) (2020)
The Project Engagement Toolkit (2021)

You can find details from original articles. The following section will focus on the Project Engagement Toolkit.

The Project Engagement Toolkit

During August 2020 to Feb 2021, I worked on the Activity U project which is a knowledge curation project. I wrote several articles which were edited as two books (drafts):

I also developed several frameworks and curated ideas from Activity Theory with other theoretical resources in order to make some practical frameworks such as Life-as-Activity and Project Engagement.

The Project Engagement Toolkit 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 tools for practitioners.

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

I published the Project Engagement Toolkit on Feb 3, 2021. One framework of the toolkit is Platform for Development (P4D, v1.0) which was published on Dec 13, 2020. Later, I expanded the P4D to v2.0 with a new book: Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century. However, the new book is not about Activity Theory, but the ecological practice approach. Thus, I renamed the P4D (v1.0) as the Developmental Project Model.

The above diagram is the new version of the Project Engagement toolkit. I also modified module 6 and module 7.

The old name of module 6 was “Life as Activity: The Chain of Project”, its new name is “Creative Life as Networks of Enterprise”.

Originally, there was “Activity Theory” in the center of module 7. Now we only see “Project” there.

This modification refers to a new thematic space: the “Project” thematic space.

The ”Project” Thematic Space

The new version of Project Engagement has the following eight modules:

0) Project Impact Orientation
1) Project as “Social Movement”
2) The Activity System Model
3) Activity as Formation of Concept
4) Zone of Project
5) Developmental Project
6) Creative Life as Networks of Enterprise
7) The “You — Project” Engagement

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 unit of analysis of Activity and Activity as Formation of Concept. The most important difference between Blunden’s original approach and my interpretation is that his vision is developing a general interdisciplinary theory of Activity as a meta-theory. However, my vision is adopting his meta-theory and developing some frameworks and models for practical studies. You can find more details here.

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.

First, the Developmental Project Model is an independent framework. From the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach, a Project can be considered as a Container and a Developmental Environment. From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, Project can be considered as Lev Vygotsky’s “Social Situation of Development”. On May 25, 2021, I published Personal Innovation as Career-fit. In order to reflect on my own career experience, I adopted the Developmental Project Model and HERO U diagram for developing the Career-fit framework. There is a new form of the Developmental Project Model: Project I. On June 9, 2021, I developed a canvas for the model. The canvas offers us a simple and powerful practical tool for studying the relationship between Project and People.

In fact, I also used the Developmental Project to manage my own projects and study others’ projects. It became an instrument for reflection and research.

Second, there is a concept called Projectivity behind the module 4 Zone of Project and the module 5 Developmental Project Model. On Jan 9, 2021, I coined a term called Projectivity for Cultural Projection Analysis. The Concept of “Projectivity” is inspired by Ecological Psychologist James J. Gibson’s Affordance Theory and Andy Blunden’s Project-oriented Activity Theory. The concept of Projectivity can be considered as a new idea for the Project-oriented Activity Theory and other Project-oriented approaches.

What’s Projectivity? It refers to potential action opportunities of forming a project or participating in a project for people to actualize their development with others. I have discussed three types of Projectivity:

Primary Projectivity
Secondary Projectivity
Tertiary Projectivity

On April 24, 2021, I introduced the Infoniche Model and adopted the notion of Project to expand the original Infoniche framework.

Third, I also adopted Howard E. Gruber’s Evolving Systems Approach to the study of Creative Work (1974,1989) for module 6. One of core concepts of Gruber’s approach is Networks of Enterprise which refers to the pattern of work in the life of a creative individual. Gruber said, “We use the term enterprise to stand for a group of related projects and activities broadly enough defined so that (1) the enterprise may continue when the creative person finds one path blocked but another open toward the same goal and (2) when success is achieved the enterprise does not come to an end but generates new tasks and projects that continue it.” (1989, p.11)

For Gruber, “Enterprise” is a tool for organizing “projects” within a creative person’s life. According to Gruber, the enterprise has some characteristics such as variety, longevity and durability, and tradeoff (1989, p.11–12). Gruber also pointed out the relationship between the Self and Network of Enterprise, “First, and most important, by constituting the person’s organization of purpose, it defines the working self. Each creative person has certain conceptions of his or her life tasks. Although we think of the creative person as highly task-oriented rather than ego-oriented, it is also true that the set of tasks taken as a whole constitutes a large part of the ego: to be oneself one must do these things; to do these things one must be oneself. Second, the network of enterprise provides a structure that organizes a complex life. In the course of a single day or week, the activities of the person may appear, from the outside, as a bewildering miscellany. But the person is not disoriented or dazzled. He or she can readily map each activity onto one or another enterprise. Third, the network provides an organization of goals within which the person can set different levels of aspiration. Finally, the network of enterprise helps the creative person to define his or her own uniqueness.”(1989, p.13)

Since my focus is knowledge workers and creators, I realized that the notion of “Networks of Enterprise” is perfect for the Project Engagement Toolkit.

If we connect these dots together and put them on the “Project” thematic space, then we see a new baby.

The Projectification of Society

The Activity System model has been orienting many empirical research since 1987. Clay Spinuzzi’s book All Edge is a great example. Spinuzzi adopts a term “adhocracies” from Alvin Toffler to describe the trend of projectification of works and organizations: “rotating teams of specialists who could come together to swarm a project, disperse at the end of it, and re-form in a different configuration for the next project.” (2015, p.1). Spinuzzi highlights a key organizational principle for differing all-edge adhocracies from bureaucracies: projectification.

The term “projectification” was coined by Christophe Midler who is a management professor in 1995. Midler uses the term to refer to the trend of transformation from hierarchical function-centered organization to cross-functional project-centered organization. According to Spinuzzi, “Projectification is the organizing principle of adhocracies: the organization of work around project teams oriented to defined projects, as opposed to departments oriented to narrow functions (the organizing principle of bureaucracies). The adhocracy is organized around a specific, defined project objective with a specific endpoint.” (2015, p.32)

Spinuzzi also identifies two types of projects. He points out, “…networks are well suited to unique projects that require innovation, flexibility, and creativity, particularly if these projects involve the inexpensive, rapid communication that is necessary for supporting constant mutual adjustment. But they’re not well suited for projects that require repeatability, operating efficiency, or control; those requirements are better fulfilled by an institutional hierarchy.” (2015, p.69)

One typical activity of “adhocracies” is knowledge work. According to Spinuzzi, “Knowledge work is, simply put, work that involves thinking about, analyzing, and communicating things rather than growing or manufacturing things. It includes occupations such as graphic design, web development, and copy-writing. It involves specialist work, it tends to be project oriented, and its products tend to be symbolic (designs, working websites, text) and thus electronically transportable, circulable through information and communication technologies. Knowledge work, in fact, tends to be fast and changing and connective — that is, it needs what organizational networks can provide.” (2015, p.60)

Spinuzzi’s book also gave me many ideas about the theme of Project. Now I can claim that it inspired many Sparks for my “Project” thematic space. It refers to a social need for a new framework about the “Project” theme.

Result as Resource

In Thematic Space: Sparks In, Statue Out, I have discussed the Enter — Exit Trajectory. The basic form of the canvas of Thematic Space is a matrix. There are two dimensions:

The Enter — Exit dimension
The Individual — Collective dimension

For the Knowledge Curation project, the Enter is related to Resources and the Exit is related to Results. That means we consider two types of resources for Developing Tacit Knowledge: Theory and Practice. 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”.

If we connect two thematic spaces together, then we can expand the the Enter — Exit Trajectory as an Attach — Detach Flow.

Now we can connect the “Activity” thematic space and the “Project” thematic space together. For the “Activity” thematic space, the Project Engagement toolkit is a result. For the “Project” thematic space, the Project Engagement toolkit is a resource.

The above diagram also highlights a path of Developing Tacit Knowledge. We can adopt a result of a theoretical work and apply it to a theme of practice.

Originally, the Project Engagement toolkit was born from the work of Project-oriented Activity Theory. Now, it is an instrument for practitioners.

Below is a list of my projects. I use “Project” to refer to both a work and a concept. Some projects only are for offering a new concept from the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory. Other projects are normal work activities from the perspective of Activity System Model.