Slow Cognition: The Spark Space Canvas

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9 min readFeb 10, 2022

Natural Space and Artificial Space

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:

This article aims to introduce the Spark Space Canvas. 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

You can find more details about these three canvases here.

A Spark for the Spark Space Canvas

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. I have developed a canvas called Opportunity Canvas which is perfect for discussing the “Exit” side.

So, I had an idea to design a new canvas for the “Enter” side. However, I didn’t get a good idea about it until I saw the video below on Linkedin. In fact, the video I saw on Linkedin is not the original one. You can watch it now and find more background information here.

The video gives me a Spark. I realized that there are two types of spaces for Sparks.

Natural Space
Artificial Space

The video presents a “social experiment” which is an “Artificial Space”. According to BrandinginAsia, “This Women’s Day Paytm launched a film highlighting a social experiment it ran that illustrates the stark differences between men and women when it comes to financial literacy. The campaign, which was created in partnership with Dentsu Impact India, consisted of a number of questions starting very general and broad and getting more specific and focused…the campaign aimed to help viewers realize that making women in India financially literate and confident is a major and crucial step in the right direction on the path to practicing gender equality.”

This “Artificial Space” is designed by a mobile financial service company and its creative agency.

The Spark Space Canvas

The notion of “Natural Space” and “Artificial Space” is great for defining the structure of the Spark Space Canvas.

Inner space: Natural Space
Outer space: Artificial Space

The above diagram is the first version of the Spark Space Canvas. Its basic form is a matrix. There are two dimensions behind the matrix: the “Ecological — Social” dimension and the “Fact — Fiction” dimension.

Four Types of Knowledge Sparks

Based on the two dimensions, I discovered four types of Knowledge Sparks:

Imagery (mental imagination): Sparks inspired by literary works (or other sources) that evokes a mental image or other kinds of sense impressions.
Semantics (cultural meme): Sparks inspired by the meaning of a word, phrase, sentence, or text.
Narrative (communicative scene): Sparks inspired by storytelling, performance, conversation, in a situational activity.
Affordance (material interaction): Sparks inspired by real interactions between human, object, and environment.

Here 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 names of these four types of Sparks. Anyway, the point is the differences and similarities between these four types.

Imagery/Semantics is located at the “Fiction” zone because they directly link to imagination and language.
Narrative/Affordance refers to real situational embodied experience which is located at the “Fact” zone.
Imagery v.s. Semantics: Imagery refers to visual mental image 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. I don’t consider Data as Sparks because we can put it into the category of “Semantics”. A data works like a sign because a data refers to “number (data value)/meaning (actual value)”.

The Natural Space

What does Natural Space mean? It refers to non-designed environments. See the following examples:

Space
Gesture
Action
Game
Dialogue
Story
Word
Metaphor

The Artificial Space

What about Artificial Space? It refers to designed environments. For example:

Place
Performance
Intervention
Experiment
Debate
Show
Genre
Schema

The Inner-outer Mapping

Also, there are one to one mapping relationship between the above examples:

Place > Space
Performance > Gesture
Intervention > Action
Experiment > Game
Debate > Dialogue
Show > Story
Genre > Word
Schema > Metaphor

These examples are not perfect. The one-to-one mapping relationships are not ideal too.

The primary value of the new canvas is making a distinction between Natural Space and Artificial Space.

Natural v.s. Artificial

Originally, I only used one term “Ecological Situation” for the Context of Developing Tacit Knowledge. Now we can consider Natural Space and Artificial Space as two sub-categories of Ecological Situation.

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 Ecological View

My own work, the Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James Gibson’s “Ecological Psychology (Affordance Theory)” and Roger G. Barker’s “Ecological Psychology (Behavior Setting Theory)”. Though they work on different branches, they share a similar “ecological view”.

According to Roger Barker, there are three major sectors of the basic psychological unit defined by Brunswik:

the ecological sector of objects and physical events that become stimuli
the organism or intrapersonal sector of receptive, central, and effector processes
the behavioral sector of actones (molecular acts) and achievements (molar behavior) that occur, again, in the ecological environment

This basic psychological unit is named the E-O-E arc. Some schools of psychology only consider some parts of the E-O-E arc. Ecological Psychology, according to Roger Barker, aims to encompass the whole E-O-E arc.

Roger used the diagram below to represent his vision of “Ecological Psychology” or “Eco-behavior science”.

Barker pointed out, “The subject matter of ecological psychology cannot be represented by an arc joining — via receptor, central, and effector systems — ecological objects and events on the afferent and efferent sides of persons; it must be represented by circuits that incorporate the behavior of persons with objects and events of the ecological environment to form interdependent units. Ecological psychology is more than a behavior science; it is an eco-behavior science. ”(1989, p.149)

After defining the scope of phenomena of eco-behavior science, Barker offered his methods for a new science.

T Data and O Data

According to Barker, there are types of data-generating systems in the science of psychology:

T Data: Psychologists as Transducers
O Data: Psychologists as Operators

See the diagram below:

For the “T Data” system, “…the transformations constitute the psychologist’s only contribution to the data of the system. By using the psychologist as a transducer only, and not as operator, this system produces data that denote a world the psychologist did not make in any respect; they signal behavior and its conditions, in situ.” (1989, p.152)

For the “O Data” system, the psychologist is not only a transducer, but also an operator. The psychologist dominates the system.

Barker claimed that the “eco-behavior science” is a transducer science, “research psychologists function as sensors and transducers, and its data record behavior and its conditions in situ.” (1989, p.153)

My notion of “Natural Space — Artificial Space” is inspired by Barker’s “T Data — O Data”.

Optimize Your Infoniche

One more thing about “Natural Space — Artificial Space” is the Infoniche framework.

The term “niche” is originally from ecology, the Ecological Psychologist James Gibson redefines it from the perspective of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, “Ecologists have the concept of a niche. A species of animal is said to utilize or occupy a certain niche in the environment. This is not quite the same as the habitat of the species; a niche refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. I suggest that a niche is a set of affordances. The natural environment offers many ways of life, and different animals have different ways of life. The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche. Note the complementarity of the two. But note also that the environment as a whole with its unlimited possibilities existed prior to animals. The physical, chemical, meteorological, and geological conditions of the surface of the earth and the pre-existence of plant life are what make animal life possible. They had to be invariant for animals to evolve.” (1979/2015, pp.120–121)

Following Gibson’s definition of niche, I coined a new term Infoniche which is defined as a set of potential action possibilities such as affordances and supportances. The part of “info” means the new version of niche aims to expand Gibson’s idea into the information age and digital environments. However, I want to claim that Infoniche doesn’t only refer to information environments or digital environments, but both traditional environments and digital environments. Moreover, the Infoniche framework also expands Gibson’s idea from natural environment to social environment by working with the concept of Supportance.

Unlike Roger Barker, Gibson doesn’t develop a systematic analysis framework for his version of niche. Inspired by Barker’s work on the theory of Behavior Settings, I develop a concrete analysis framework for applying the concept Infoniche to empirical studies.

For practical value, I also developed a tool called The Infoniche Checklist. The tool encourages people to reflect on their infoniche based on different levels of environments from three dimensions:

Exploit (productivity): it is related to normal affordances/supportances.
Explore (creativity): it is related to novel affordances/supportances.
Curate (curativity): it is related to organizing of multiple affordances/supportances.

The chart below lists some examples of questions for practical study and discussion. I added “Project” to the checklist in 2021.

The structure behind the Infoniche Checklist can be applied to discussing Knowledge Sparks.

In order to gain more useful Knowledge Sparks, you have to be in the right Spots, Zones, Camps, Projects, and Bas.

If you want to optimize your activities of Developing Tacit Knowledge, you should optimize your Infoniche. If you can’t change your Infoniche, you can change your focus of Developing Tacit Knowledge.

Why did I choose Ecological Psychology as my primary object of Developing Tacit Knowledge around 2014 to 2016? Because my second son was born in 2013 and I knew Affordance Theory which is the core of Ecological Psychology in 2014. I realized that my life situation is perfect for learning Ecological Psychology, so I played with my sons and took many photos of “Affordance” type of Sparks.

It was an amazing experience to me because I can see a theory in my real life world.

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