CALL: Creativity, Opportunity, and Possible Practice
The reborn of a knowledge center
On September 9, 2019, I got the name idea of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab) at 7:37 pm and drew the draft of the logo idea at 10:03 pm. See the above picture. You can find more details in The Born Of #Call And Its Logo.
CALL is my personal studio and it appeared as a Medium publication. In the past three years, I wrote many articles and edited several possible books.
On June 2, 2022, CALL launched Curativity Center which is a Knowledge Center for developing Curativity Theory and related applications such as the Knowledge Curation Project. New articles about Curation will be moved to a new publication on Medium.
In CALL: The Launch Day of Curativity Center, I introduced five Knowledge Centers:
- Creative Action Learning Lab (CALL)
- Activity Analysis Center
- Platform Ecology Center
- Life Strategy Center
- Curativity Center
As a meta Knowledge Center, Curativity Center will support the other four knowledge centers. All five knowledge centers will be hosted with a set of non-code collaborative digital platforms. In this way, they will be run as collaborative projects.
Moreover, they will form a “Project Network” which refers to a three-level dynamic structure: a network of thematic spaces, a network of projects, and a network of people. You can find more details in Life Strategy: Moving between Thematic Spaces.
For the past three years, CALL was the incubator of the above five knowledge centers. Curativity Center was born from CALL.
Now, CALL and Curativity Theory exchange their positions. In the future, Curativity Center will be the meta-center for building the network of knowledge centers.
CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab) will return to its focus “Creative Actions” which refers to the Ecological Practice Approach, Lifesystem framework, and Possible Practice.
The new themes of CALL are the following three keywords:
Creativity, Opportunity, and Possible Practice
This article aims to review the development of CALL and imagine its future.
Part 1: The Development of CALL
The Journey of CALL started on Sept 10, 2019, when I visited Discovery Green in Downtown Houston. See this tweet.
Finally, I got the name idea for my action research project. Let’s call it #CALL which stands for Creative Action Learning Lab! !!!
My idea was inspired by the above art. The meaning of CALl can be described by the following card which is my second answer to the #TalkThree Challenge: the “CONTENT — ACTION-?” challenge.
The #TalkThree Challenge is a game for thinking with themes. It allows more than one answer. For the “CONTENT-ACTION-?” challenge, my first answer is INTERACTION. The second answer is CALL which is a category bridged CONTENT and ACTION. For example, “Call to Action”. I consider CALL has two levels of content or two steps of content, the initial part is a Challenge, and the following part is a Response. So, the Challenge-and-Response is a basic unit of social interaction.
1.1 Mission
After spending many years in the digital nonprofit community, I changed my attention to theory and research. During the last almost five years, my personal learning journey focused on ecological psychology, practice theories, cognitive science, and the philosophy of science. One of the most important things I want to do is to bridge theory and practice.
The “bridge” has two meanings to me. First, I want to bridge my past with my future. There are various miscellaneous work and learning experiences within my past career. After learning some theories, I feel my chaotic experience suddenly become an invaluable asset for my future career. Second, there is a huge opportunity for transformation between scientific knowledge creation and everyday life creation.
Another interesting thing is that two of the theories I learned are highly tied to Action. Ecological psychology is about the perception-action loop and Practice Theories are about acts, actions, and activities within everyday life.
1.2 A Creative Space (2019–2020)
In Sept 2019, I started this publication on Medium as a personal journey: building a learning community about action design, action study, and action theory.
- In April 2020, I used Action-based creativity as CALL’s slogan.
- In Oct 2020, I changed its slogan to the house of boundary innovation.
Though CALL is a publication on Medium, I see it as a container that contains my knowing activities. Thus, instead of talking about published articles, I will focus on my thoughts and acts.
1.3 A Knowledge Studio (2020–2021)
On Oct 1, 2020, I reviewed the first one-year journey of CALL (2019–2020) and talked about its future.
CALL will focus on three themes: Transdisciplinary Thinking (mind), Creative Actions (action), and Platform for Development (ecology). Also, CALL adopts a multi-perspective approach which incorporates four perspectives: Digital technology perspective (technology), interaction design perspective (design), business ecology perspective (business), and social practice perspective (culture).
On Oct 31, 2021, I reviewed the development of CALL from Oct 2020 to Sept 2021.
In the past one year, CALL became a Knowledge Curation Studio which produces a set of knowledge frameworks and builds an ecology of ideas. I also wrote seven books which are drafts. In addition, I worked on four independent research projects in order to test concepts and frameworks.
The mission behind CALL is connecting Theory and Practice.
In 2021, the most significant achievement is the Ecological Practice approach (v3.0). I started the long journey of developing the theoretical approach in Oct 2019. On Sept 30, 2021, I published Lifesystem: Modeling Ice Skating and Other Social Practices which is the final piece of the approach. The theoretical work is done.
Inspired by Howard E. Gruber’s Evolving Systems Approach to the study of Creative Work (1974,1989), I use his idea “Network of Enterprise” to manage my creative work.
According to Gruber, “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)
I sort my frameworks into seven enterprises. Each enterprise has a short nickname.
- CALL for ECHO → Boundary Innovation
- CALL for LIFE → Creative Life
- CALL for NICE → Creative Action
- CALL for NEST → Part — Whole
- CALL for DEEP → Supportive Development
- CALL for NEXT → Present — Future
- CALL for META → Meta-knowledge
Each enterprise has its primary theme. Each theme refers to a core framework and a set of related concepts, diagrams, and sub-frameworks.
1.4 A Knowledge Center (2021–2022)
On Oct 31, 2021, I used the following diagram to describe the future of CALL.
The above diagram represents the new annual theme of CALL for the years 2021 to 2022. The core concepts of the Ecological Practice approach are Affordance, Attachance, Supportance, and Curativity. Since I have written several books about these concepts, the next step is applying these concepts to develop more knowledge frameworks, guide case studies, and curate theory-practice dialogues.
I consider my frameworks as opportunities for other knowledge creators. Thus, the challenge for CALl is searching and finding an approach of organization in order to actualize the above opportunities of knowledge creation for a group of talents.
From Jan 2022 to June 2022, I focused on the Life Discovery Project and other related projects for the past six months.
Then, I realized that I need to establish a new Knowledge Center for the Knowledge Curation project. In June 2022, I launched Curativity Center and moved the Knowledge Curation project to the new knowledge center.
Now, CALL returns to its original focus — Creative Action — with a unique theoretical approach.
Part 2: The Future of CALL
In May 2022, I also edited a book titled Ecological Practice Design: The Lifesystem Approach to Everyday Life Innovation.
I started developing the Ecological Practice Approach in 2019 and the Lifesystem framework was born in Oct 2020. In the past four years, I wrote several books (in drafts) about the approach:
- Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice (2019)
- After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action (2020)
- Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century (2021)
Each year I write a book and each book establishes an important theoretical concept for the Ecological Practice approach. Curativity introduces the concept of Curativity and develops the toolkit version of the approach. After Affordance introduces the concept of Attachance and develops the germ-cell version of the approach. Platform for Development introduces the concept of Supportance.
Some readers may know that Creative Design is one of my career themes. My early career was designing newspaper ads and corporate identity. Later, I moved to digital interaction design. Now, I am working on activity analysis and service design.
However, I didn’t intend to write a book about Design. In May 2022, a friend of mine who works in the direction of social innovation asked me for some perspectives on Activity Theory and the Ecological Practice approach. Later, I realized that I should collect my articles about the approach, the Lifesystem framework, and related theoretical concepts together and edit a new book.
The primary focus of the book is the Lifesystem framework which is an intermedia knowledge framework for connecting theory and practice.
An ideal knowledge framework should contain two types of concepts: Theoretical Concepts and Operational Concepts. The Lifesystem framework considers eight operational concepts.
The book also curates several relevant frameworks for understanding the eight operational concepts. Together, they form a toolkit.
The new version of CALL will focus on Ecological Practice Design, the Lifesystem Approach, and the Ecological Practice Approach. The name Ecological Practice Design refers to the following keywords:
- Ecological: It refers to the original source of the Ecological Practice Approach approach: Ecological Psychology.
- Practice: It refers to a major theoretical resource of the Ecological Practice Approach: Activity Theory and social practice theories in general.
- Design: It refers to a social practice of making something new creatively.
- Lifesystem: It refers to the Lifesystem Framework.
- Approach: It refers to a knowledge enterprise that contains theoretical concepts, operational concepts, frameworks, methods, etc.
- Everyday Life Innovation: It refers to the innovation of improving the quality of individual daily life.
The above six keywords define the boundary and the focus of the new version of CALL. Moreover, we can use the following three keywords to describe the new CALL:
Creativity, Opportunity, and Possible Practice
As mentioned above, the theme of “Opportunity” is defined as the annual theme from 2021 to 2022 for CALL. The term “Possible Practice” refers to the mission of the Ecological Practice approach. See the diagram below.
The notion of Everyday Life Innovation is understood as the notion of “Possible Practice (Creative Actions)” from the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach.
The Ecological Practice approach produced two methods: Ecological Physics Method and Ecological Interaction Analysis.
This new perspective goes beyond the original perspective of creativity study, it is more about creative actions for achieving a creative life for an individual and making possible practice for the collective society.
I am also working on building a new website for the Platform Ecology project. You can save the following links:
- PlatformEcology.org
- Twitter: @PlatformEcology
- Linkedin: @PlatformEcology
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
