Slow Cognition: Three Canvases for Developing Tacit Knowledge

Published in

CALL4

12 min readFeb 2, 2022

Spark Space > Theme Space > Statue Space

Last month I started the Slow Cognition project and worked on a particular tool called Thematic Space Canvas for Developing Tacit Knowledge. Eventually, I developed three canvases for the project.

The Spark Space Canvas
The Thematic Space Canvas
The Statue Space Canvas

This article aims to put these three canvases together within the context of the Slow Cognition project.

The Slow Cognition Project

The Slow Cognition Project is about the historical-cognitive approach and the long-term development of thoughts.

On April 26, 2021, I sent an email to a friend of mine and introduced my book The ECHO Way which reflects on my journey of writing three books in six months.

I coined a new term called Slow Cognition to describe my favorite methods such as Howard E. Gruber’s evolving systems approach to creative work.

Scholars use Hot Cognition and Cold Cognition to describe two types of cognitive studies. Cold cognition refers to the pure cognitive processing of information that is independent of emotional involvement. Hot cognition considers emotional aspects.

You probably read Daniel Kahneman’s 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow which highlights two models of thought: System 1 and System 2.

My term Slow Cognition is related to System 2. However, I personally don’t like the System 1/System 2 framework because I adopt Keith E. Stanovich’s model of three types of mind: Autonomous mind, Algorithmic mind, and Reflective Mind.

The major difference between my term Slow Cognition and Kahneman/Stanovich’s terms is research methods. My term Slow Cognition refers to the historical-cognitive approach which is about the long-term development of thoughts. Cognitive psychologists focus on short-term thoughts.

The Slow Cognition Project rejects the common sense of aha moment for creative cognition. Also, It refers to the metaphor of journeys, and long-term activities, which echoes the Path of Creative Life and the Life-as-Activity framework.

Developing Tacit Knowledge with Thematic Space

On Dec 25, 2021, I published the diagram below as a framework for discussing Developing Tacit Knowledge.

On Jan 5, 2022, I published an article titled the Notion of Thematic Spaces and introduced the Thematic Space Canvas.

For me, the notion of Thematic Spaces is part of a large knowledge enterprise that contains the following ideas:

Curativity Theory > Cognitive Container > Knowledge Curation
Curativity Theory > Themes of Practice
Life as Activity > Creative Life > Slow Cognition
Mind as Play > Diagramming as Practice
Mind as Play > Developing Tacit Knowledge
Mind as Play > Themes of Practice

For Curativity Theory, the notion of Thematic Spaces is a new theoretical concept that is part of the Knowledge Curation framework. Also, Themes of Practice is a sub-theory of Curativity Theory, the notion of Thematic Spaces is also part of the Themes of Practice framework.

The notion of Slow Cognition refers to the long-term development of thoughts and the historical-cognitive method. The notion of Thematic Spaces is a great tool for turning the notion of Slow Cognition from a concept into a project.

Sparks In, Statue Out

On Jan 14, I used two metaphors to describe the tacit knowledge development activity: Knowledge Sparks and Knowledge Statues.

The above diagram represents the lifeflow of thematic space: the Enter — Exit Trajectory.

The Enter—Exit dimension is inspired by my work the Ecological Practice approach which highlights the concept of Container. As mentioned above, the thematic space is a super cognitive container. The Enter—Exit dimension describes the whole process of interaction with the container.

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”.

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.

Spark, Theme, Statue… Together, they form a flow of Developing Tacit Knowledge. The three canvases make the invisible flow visible.

The Spark Space Canvas

The notion of Sparks echoes the term “mental elements” which is part of Dean Keith Simonton’s Chance-configuration theory (Scientific Genius,1988). Simonton doesn’t develop a typology for the term. Also, his theory is about scientific knowledge activities. My primary interest is connecting Theory and Practice, thus I also consider professional workers’ tacit knowing activities.

The “Theory — Practice” dimension refers to a pair of concepts “Fact — Fiction”. Based on the notion, I discovered four types of Sparks:

Imagery: Sparks inspired by literary works (or other sources) that evoke a mental image or other kinds of sense impressions.
Semantics: Sparks inspired by the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text.
Narrative: Sparks inspired by storytelling, performance, and conversation, in a situational activity.
Affordance: Sparks inspired by real interactions between humans, objects, and environments.

I use “Imagery”, “Semantics”, “Narrative” and “Affordance” as labels for four types of Sparks. We should just see these terms as placeholders. So far, I can’t find other terms for the names of these four types of Sparks. Anyway, the point is the differences and similarities between these four types.

Imagery/Semantics is located in the “Fiction” zone because they directly link to imagination and language.
Narrative/Affordance refers to real situational embodied experience which is located in the “Fact” zone.
Imagery v.s. Semantics: Imagery refers to the visual mental images while Semantics refers to understanding and appropriate use of meaning in single words, phrases, sentences, and even longer units.
Narrative v.s. Affordance: Narrative is about human-to-human communicative activities. Affordance is about human-to-environment embodied activities.

This is not an ideal typology of Sparks, I think these four types of Sparks are important types.

The Spark Space Canvas also defines two sub-spaces:

Natural Space: non-designed environments
Artificial Space: designed environments

Both Natural Space and Artificial Space are important for generating Knowledge Sparks. But we have to pay attention to the difference between these two sources of Knowledge Sparks.

The distinction between Natural Space and Artificial Space also refers to different research methods. For example, Ecological Psychologists and Experimental Psychologists use different ways to collect data. Ecological psychologists get data from Natural Space while experimental psychologists get data from Artificial Space.

The Theme Space Canvas

For the model of knowledge curation, the notion of Thematic Spaces is both objective and subjective. An important feature of Thematic Spaces is connecting objective theoretical resources and subjective work experience.

From the perspective of Curativity Theory, building and developing a Thematic Space means the Objective — Subjective knowledge curation.

The Thematic Space Canvas is designed with the following two dimensions:

The Theory — Practice dimension
The End — Means dimension

The Theory — Practice dimension is the core issue of the ECHO Way and the Knowledge Curation Project. You can find more details from the original project HERO U — A New Framework for Knowledge Heroes.

The End — Means dimension refers to the Means-End Spectrum which is published in a previous article about diagraming.

The form of the canvas is a matrix. There are other two dimensions:

The Enter—Exit dimension
The Individual — Collective dimension

The Enter—Exit dimension is inspired by my work the Ecological Practice approach which highlights the concept of Container. As mentioned above, the thematic space is a super cognitive container. The Enter—Exit dimension describes the whole process of interaction with the container.

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. This leads to the second dimension: individual — Collective.

The Individual — Collective dimension is inspired by Activity Theory and other social practice theories. I personally consider them as knowledge resources for my “Activity” thematic space. The major notion behind these theoretical approaches is that they consider individual actions within a social practice context or a human activity. For Developing Tacit Knowledge, I also consider personal actions and social context. This is the reason that I don’t use the term “Personal Knowledge Development”.

The above canvas also has two nested squares which divide the thematic space into two sub-spaces: inner space and outer space. We can adopt the metaphor of City to understand these two sub-spaces. While a city is a whole, we can clearly identify its inner space and its outer space. For Developing Tacit Knowledge, the inner space is all about personal knowing activities while the outer space is related to social interactions.

Based on the above settings, I generated a series of mapping between outer space and inner space:

Approaches — Tastes
Concepts — Notions
Events — Projects
Domains — Works
Perspectives — Views
Frameworks — Insights
Methods — Guides
Heuristics — Skills

Should we consider the inner space as the space of Personal Tacit Knowledge or Personal Knowledge? We can roughly use it in this way. However, I am not going to develop a new definition of the concept of Tacit Knowledge or Personal Knowledge. The above settings are only for discussing the process of Developing.

The Statue Space Canvas

I use “Statues” to describe the basic forms of explicit knowledge. This is a metaphor too.

A statue is a free-standing, solid, complete, permanent thing. This metaphor refers to my own views on the ideal forms of explicit knowledge:

Free-standing: It should be independent.
Solid: It should be trustable and reliable.
Complete: It should be a meaningful whole.
Permanent: It should be reusable, even timeless.

The four types of Statues are identified by a format of Container (Knowledge). As mentioned above, I don’t focus on the content of explicit knowledge. I think a particular explicit knowledge could apply to various applications. Also, an application could be a container of several explicit pieces of knowledge.

The four types of Statues mean four types of Knowledge Containers. Inspired by the Opportunity Space canvas (see the diagram below), I think we can adopt its typology for Knowledge Container. Also, I use “Media” to replace “Content”.

The Opportunity Space was developed for discussing the productization of diagrams. I placed “Diagram” in the center of the canvas. As mentioned before, I used the term Diagrams interchangeably with Knowledge Frameworks. Thus, the Opportunity Space is about the productization of knowledge frameworks too.

Since these four criteria of Statues are about ideal forms of explicit knowledge. In the real-life world, not everything is ideal. I think the four types of Statues are acceptable for the canvas of Thematic Space.

Let’s look at the differences and similarities between these four types:

Media/Community: they are located in the “culture” zone because they refer to collective relevance and “information — rule” issues.
Service/Tool: they are located in the “experience” zone because they refer to individual behavior and “body — need” issues.
Media and Tool: they are both about human-to-material interactions. Media refers to human-to-information while Tool refers to human-to-object.
Community and Service: they are both about human-to-human interactions. Community refers to communities of practice while service refers to interpersonal activities and communications.

These four types of containers are timeless. This typology is not perfect, but it covers the most important types of human social practices.

Life as a Continuous Flow

I also developed a metaphor to discuss the context of Developing Tacit Knowledge:

Experience > Flow > Life as a continuous flow
Story > Film > Project as a film with a prominent theme
Model > Floor Plan > Three canvases as floor plans

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 Story layer refers to the level of social communicative context. At this level, a person could tell his journey of developing tacit knowledge with others. I use Film as a metaphor for this layer. The Story layer is also inspired by my experience of writing my learning autobiographies and working on learning narrative-related projects. I often write reflection notes for each project. I also share my journey with others.

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 that contains a family
Home: a social place that 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 that 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 that contain a person’s Tacit Knowing Activities.

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

However, we should remember the model is not our destination. The model is a mediating instrument for producing our outcome of tacit knowing activities. We need to return to the Story layer from the Model layer. We need to transform insights from Analysis into actionable guides by Synthesis.

Finally, the actionable guides should be transformed into real actions in ecological situations and return to the Experience layer.

In Jan, my focus is the concept of Thematic Spaces and related ideas. You can find more details above three canvases and related in the following articles:

The above review sets the framework for the future of the Slow Cognition project.

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

License

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) License. Please click on the link for details.