The Infoniche Model

A new diagram for the Infoniche framework

Today I design the above diagram for the Infoniche framework. It’s a great mini milestone. It originally appeared in my book draft After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I used one chapter to develop this idea as an intermediate theoretical framework for discussing various action possibilities.

I have introduced the framework in a previous article Platform as Infoniche. Now it is time to give an independent stage for such an intermediate framework.

1. From Gibson’s Niche to Infoniche

Readers may know I have been working on the Ecological Practice approach since March 2019 when I finished the draft of Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice.The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology, Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings Theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, and practice theories. There are two goals behind the Ecological Practice approach:

• 1) Expanding Ecological Psychology from native natural environment to modern digital environment.
• 2) Expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis.

During May 2020, I wrote the draft of After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for the above tasks. I spent one chapter introducing the Infoniche framework. After reviewing Gibson’s idea Niche, Barker’s idea Behavior Settings, and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems, I coined a new term Infoniche and developed an analysis framework for understanding ecological niches in the information age.

The term “niche” is originally from ecology, 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.

2. The Structure of Infoniche

The Infoniche framework is designed with four dimensions and six levels of analysis. I used three steps to develop this framework.

First , I defined two types of dimensions as settings of infoniche. The first one is Routine Settings which refer to various normal settings of material environments (such as house, tools, cars, mobile phone, etc), individual habits and institutional norms. The second one is Cultural Settings which refers to ideology, cultural themes, mass media and social media content, etc. These two settings provide a concrete context and an abstract context for a person’s life.

Second, I defined two types of dimensions for understanding a person’s life. The first one is Embodied Actions which refer to individual body scale level actions. The second one is Social Activities which refer to various scales of social activities. The dimension of Embodied Actions corresponds to the analysis of Affordances while the dimension of Social Activities corresponds to the analysis of Supportances.

Third, I defined six levels of analysis based on the four dimensions. For the Routine Settings, I consider it as one level of analysis. For Cultural Settings, I pay attention to one idea called Themes of Practice. The most important part are Embodied Actions and Social Activities because they directly connect to Affordances and Supportances. In order to conceptualize an analysis framework, I selected a series of terms for this part:

• Spot: the body scale minimal environment.
• Zone: the one-to-one social interactional space.
• Camp: the small group scale of social space.
• Ba: the large scale of social space.

The term Spot refers to a minimal time-space scale environment which is the container of the body level immediate situational actions. The term Zone refers to a micro social space which contains the dyad, or two-person system of social interactions. The term Camp refers to a connected group of Zones. The term Ba refers to a large scale of social spaces such as a community, a field, a domain, etc.

I recently added a new layer called Project to expand the Infoniche framework. I reorganized Social Activities with a three-level hierarchy:

• Micro level: Zone and Camp
• Mezzo level: Project
• Macro level: Ba

I find Project-oriented Activity Theory is perfect for discussing the mezzo level activities of infoniche. I also have developed the Ecological Zone framework for discussing the micro level activities. In fact, the Ecological Zone framework incorporates Zone and Camp together. Thus, the term Zone within the above formula refers to the Ecological Zone framework. Readers can find details at the article Activity U (XI): Process, Position, and Zone of Project.

3. A diagram for the Infoniche framework

I name the new diagram as the Infoniche Model. It offers a visual look of the Infoniche framework.

I also suggest three types of Supportances for three types of social activities.

• Zone: Ecological Offer
• Project: Projectivity
• Ba: Constructance

This diagram is inspired by the Supportive Cycle (v1.0) model which is a visual summary of the Platform-for-Development framework.

The Infoniche framework is an intermediate framework while the Platform-for-Development framework is a practical framework. In fact, I adopt the former to develop the latter.

4. Zone and Offer

One important idea I didn’t mention in the previous writings about the Ecological Zone framework is “Ecological Offer” which means individual level supportances. It originally appeared in my book draft After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I used one chapter to develop this idea as a new theoretical concept for discussing intersubjective action possibilities.

The pair of concept “Zone — Offer” represents the structure of “natural environment — affordance” and “social environment — supportance”. We can consider “Zone — Offer” as the intersubjective version of “social environment — supportance”.

The above diagram is a simple model of Zone and Offer. If there are continuous interactions between the subject A and subject B over time, then we can claim that there is an Ecological Zone which contains A and B. Unlike Roger’s Behavior Settings, the Ecological Zone doesn’t correspond to one particular place. The interactions inside an Ecological Zone can happen at various Spots.

At the above diagram, The “Offer” means there is a potential action possibility which is offered by Subject B for Subject A. The “Act” means the subject A takes this offer and responds to subject B.

So far, it looks pretty ordinary. However, I don’t use the word “Offer” as usual. Indeed, I developed a typology of “Offer”. I defined four categories of “Offer”: Self Offer, Tacit Offer, Explicit Offer, and Shared Offer.

The above diagram is a standard model of the Ecological Offer Framework. The most unique type of offer is Tacit Offer which means this type of potential action possibility is only perceived by Subject A, not directly provided by Subject B with explicit intentions.

5. Project and Projectivity

For “Project — Projectivity”, I also developed a typology of projectivity.

First, there is a social/cultural environment which contains Events. By perceiving and knowing Events, people recognize the Primary Projectivity which is offered by the social/cultural environment and initiate a Project. For the Primary Projectivity, its sense-maker is Events.

Once a project is initiated, it offers the Secondary Projectivity for other people to recognize the potential action opportunities of participating in the project. For the Second Projectivity, its sense-maker is the Identity of an established Project.

Third, the participants of a project could perceive and know the Tertiary Projectivity and initiate a new project which is inspired by the project. For the Tertiary Projectivity, its sense-maker is Themes and Identity of an established Project.

Readers can find more details in the article Activity U (X): Projecting, Projectivity, and Cultural Projection.

6. Ba and Constructance

The “ba” is originally found in Japanese. The concept of “ba” have been used extensively by Japanese management researcher Ikujiro Nonaka in his SECI model of knowledge creation.

I use the term “Ba” refers to a large scale of social spaces such as a community, a field, a domain, etc. For example, I use “Platform-ba” for the Platform-for-Development framework. Platform-ba offers Supportances for People. Supportance refers to potential action opportunities which could support people from the perspective of development.

One special type of supportances is the Constructive type of Supportance. Now I use a new term “Constructance” to refer to it. I have discussed the idea in a previous article The Supportive Cycle (v1.0). For example, a platform-ba could construct its platform.

7. Theme of Practice

Finally, there is a term “Themes of Practice” at the center of the Infoniche model.

Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical “themes” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life theme.” If we put culture themes and life themes together, we see a “great debate” of social science: “individual — collective.” I consider the notion of “Themes of Practice” as a “process” type of concept, not a “substance” type of concept. Thus, it is not a new category of themes, but a transformational process between individual life themes and collective culture themes. It refers to both concept and action. It connects mind and practice. It indicates the transformation of both person and society.

After reading Blunden’s book Concepts: A Critical Approach which presents a “Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky” account of “Concept”, I realized that Blunden’s argument on Concept echoes my consideration of the concept of Theme. Since Theme is a particular concept, I can adopt Blunden’s proposal — the “Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky” account of “Concept” — as a theoretical foundation to support the concept of “Themes of Practice”.

For the Infoniche framework, the “Themes of Practice” is placed at the dimension of cultural settings. I consider the “Concept — Theme” is part of the Macro-micro connection.

8. The Infoniche Checklist

Since affordances and supportances can only be perceived from environments, a person has to understand his or her environments in order to improve his or her life by actualizing various affordances and supportances. Based on these levels, the Infoniche framework offers an intervention tool called The Infoniche Checklist. The tool encourages people to reflect on their infroniche 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.

Gibson’s niche is a great idea because it points to a way of intervention. However, his research are only about visual perception and psychological theories in general. The Infoniche framework offers a new account which can satisfy the need of explanation-oriented research and intervention-oriented study.

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