TALE: One 10-day Road Trip, 21 Thematic Cards
Making digital thematic cards and physical cards
The above picture shows 21 situational themes of a road trip.
I had a wonderful 10-day road trip with my wife and two little sons from June 24 to July 3. See the above map and the route.
During the busy trip, I couldn’t write notes with details. In order to record exciting moments and engaging experiences, I used short meaningful keywords to capture some insights while taking pictures.
These short meaningful keywords are Situational Themes of my life.
After returning to Houston, I listed 21 situational themes of the trip and conducted a “Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement” activity. You can find more details in The ECHO Trip: A 10-day Road Trip and Creative Life Curation.
I considered multiple forms of the outcome of the ECHO Trip project.
- Books
- Boards
- Cards
The ECHO Trip could be a possible book about the “Creative Life Curation” method and “Thematic Exploration”.
I made a series of Thematic Network Diagrams on a Miro board.
I also made a series of cards for 21 situational themes and created a board on Milanote.
It was fun to make 21 digital thematic cards and physical cards. I also realized that this is a milestone of the TALE project because it defines a new type of activity of thematic engagement: Making digital thematic cards and physical cards.
This article aims to share all 21 thematic cards with you.
Day 1 (June 23, 2023)
Houston to New Orleans
On June 24, we visited New Orleans and had dinner at a restaurant called the Lost Cajun. While we are waiting for the meals, I took photos at the restaurant. It was my normal habit. However, I made a small change to the habit and turned it into a new game.
I showed these photos to my two litter sons and asked them to find items in these photos in the restaurant. This was a fun game.
During the trip, I played this game with my sons three times.
Day 2 (June 25, 2023)
New Orleans to Atlanta
Day 3 (June 26, 2023)
Atlanta
On June 26, we visited the World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta. I took many photos at the museum of an iconic beverage brand. One photo echoes my memory of my early career as a creative copywriter and designer.
I have over twenty years of work experience which can be divided into three stages: the creative stage, the strategic stage, and the innovative stage. At the creative stage, I worked for the advertising and media industry as a creative copywriter and designer. At the strategic state, I worked for pre-IPO stage enterprises as a business strategist and fundraising consultant. At the innovative stage, I worked on making brand-new digital tools and platforms as a researcher and designer.
The Thematic Card # 6 Tree or Chair connects to the Creative Theme of “Affordance”.
The concept of Affordance was coined and developed by the ecological psychologist James. Gibson in his book The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception.
What’s Affordance? Let’s have a look at the original definition made by Gibson, “The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment.” (1979, p.119)
The radical aspect of affordance theory is that it challenges the traditional view on the meaning of objects “concept first” and turns it to “percept first”.
Concept is about linguistic meaning and ordinary classes of objects. Gibson argued, “To perceive an affordance is not to classify an object…The theory of affordances rescues us from the philosophical muddle of assuming fixed classes of objects, each defined by its common features and then given a name. As Ludwig Wittgenstein knew, you cannot specify the necessary and sufficient features of the class of things to which a name is given. They have only a ‘family resemblance.’ But this does not mean you cannot learn how to use things and perceive their uses. You do not have to classify and label things in order to perceive what they afford.” (p.126)
In fact, affordance theory doesn’t only consider objects but considers objects as our environment. For Gibson, “objects, other persons and animals, places and hiding places” are our surrounding environment.
Before 2014, I spent most of my spare time in digital non-profit communities as a digital activist. From 2014 to 2015, I transformed my focus from nonprofit activities to theoretical learning. Since then, I have been spending most of my spare time learning Ecological Psychology, Creativity Research, and other related subjects.
After learning Ecological Psychology for five years, I wrote a book titled Curativity from Sept 2018 to March 2019. During the process of writing, I developed a new theoretical approach called the Ecological Practice Approach which aims to build an Affordance-based theory of action and adopt ideas of Ecological Psychology for analyzing various social practices.
In April 2020, I wrote a book titled After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action and introduced the second version of the Ecological Practice Approach. Then, I didn’t know what the next project should be in May 2020.
One month later, I wrote an article about “Ecological Complexity” and used it to frame a “Trilogy”: Studies in Ecological Complexity.
- Affordance Analysis: From Potential to Actual
- After Affordance: From Attach to Detach
- Curativity: From Pieces to Whole
You can find more details about “Ecological Complexity” here.
I have mentioned the Affordance Analysis Project in Knowledge Discovery: The Concept Dynamics Framework and Lifesystem: The Notion of Affordance Analysis.
The Affordance Analysis Project was designed with the following two parts:
- Empirical Analysis
- Conceptual Analysis
The Empirical Analysis focuses on my five years of observation of my two sons’ childhood. I have been watching them for many years in various environments. They often use objects in “unofficial” ways. From the perspective of ecological psychology, they are “officially” taking affordances of objects. I took many photos to record these “creative” moments in our life.
The pictures below are an example of my observation about Affordances. I took these photos during the trip.
The Concetua Analysis focuses on my reading of academic papers about the concept of Affordance since it has been influencing many psychologists, philosophers, artists, architects, designers, interaction scholars, information system researchers, etc. Many followers have been developing affordance-inspired concepts and forming a web of concepts that I called Concept Ecology.
Day 4 (June 27, 2023)
Atlanta to Cherokee
Day 5 (June 28, 2023)
- Cherokee to Great Smoky Mountains
- Great Smoky Mountains to Gatlinburg
The Thematic Card of # 12 Weaving the Mind connects to the Creative Theme of “Life Curation” and my work about Curation and Curativity Theory.
I have worked in the curation field for over ten years. I was the Chief Information Architect of BagTheWeb.com which was an early tool for content curation (We launched the site in 2010). This experience inspired me to make a long-term commitment to the Curation theme. After having 10 years of various curation-related practical work experience and theory learning, I coined a term called Curativity for discussing general curation practice. In 2019, I wrote a book (draft) titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice.
After 2019, I worked on several projects about Curativity Theory. One project is called the Curated Mind (1, 2).
On June 27, We visited the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. I saw a large unfinished basket that represents the Cherokee Weaving history. I immediately recalled my childhood when I was living in a small village where people tend to weave baskets. I also thought about Tim Berners-Lee’s 1999 book Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web.
I realized that there is an interesting difference in spatial structure between a basket and a web though they share the same weaving technique. A basket is a Container while a web is a Network.
So, I came up with a new theme: Weaving the Mind. I used it as a metaphor and associated with the Curated Mind project. More specifically, I wanted to use it to represent my own approach to developing an interdisciplinary epistemological framework.
Day 6 (June 29, 2023)
- Gatlinburg to Townsend
- Townsend to Great Smoky Mountains
- Great Smoky Mountains to Gatlinburg
The #14 theme (Turn and Dip) was inspired by the road conditions of the Great Smoky Mountains. The source of the theme comes from the natural environment.
Day 7 (June 30, 2023)
Gatlinburg to Nashville
Day 8 (July 1, 2023)
Nashville to Little Rock
Day 9 (July 2, 2023)
- Little Rock to Hot Springs
- Hot Spring to Marshall
The #18 theme (Quapaw Swirl and Yingyang) is used to represent the category of Cultural/social-related themes. The source of the theme comes from local culture and social communications.
On June 28, we visited Riverfront Park at Little Rock. I noticed a picture with a swirl in the park. The note of the picture tells me a fantastic story: “Polychrome Quapaw bottle decorated with interlocking but unconnected red and white lines that form the classic Quapaw swirl.”
I immediately associated it with Yinyang (Yin Yang) which is a Chinese philosophical concept that describes opposite but interconnected forces. The picture below is the Yin and Yang symbol. You can find more details on Wikipedia.
Day 10 (July 3, 2023)
Marshall to Houston
After returning to Houston, I listed 21 situational themes of the trip and conducted a “Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement” activity.
- Thematic Analysis: I used 21 situational themes as data and analyzed the patterns of these themes.
- Learning Engagement: It’s a great experience to connect situational themes with other themes of my life.
Eventually, I decided to use the ECHO Way model to reflect on the trip and conduct a case study of Creative Life Curation.
From the perspective of Curativity Center, the Creative Life Curation project is part of the journey of building the knowledge enterprise of Curativity Theory. In 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice.
I have been working in the curation field for over ten years. I was the Chief Information Architect of BagTheWeb which was an early tool for content curation (We launched the site in 2010). This experience inspired me to make a long-term commitment to the Curation theme. After having 10 years of various curation-related practical work experience and theory learning, I coined a term called Curativity and developed Curativity Theory which became a book.
The new term Curativity refers to “curating pieces into a meaningful whole” which means general curatorial practice. The reason why I coined the term is that I was not satisfied with the specific view of curation such as “professional curation means art and museum.” I argued that there is a need to redefine “curatorial practice” as a general social activity and a universal experience. In other words, I was calling for an interdisciplinary view of curation or curatorial practice.
From June 2020 to Oct 2022, I worked on the Knowledge Curation project (phase 1) that aimed to connect THEORY and PRACTICE by turning Pieces into a meaningful Whole.
From Oct 2022 to Nov 2022, I worked on the Creative Life Curation project (phase 1) that aimed to connect Individual Life Experiences and Collective Culture. It refers to both personal innovation and cultural innovation.
As a “Creative Life Curation” project, The ECHO Trip used thematic analysis and thematic mapping to represent a thematic dialogue between Individual Situational Themes and Individual Life Themes.
Thematic Card Sorting
Finally, I made a set of physical cards for fun. Now we can play the card sorting game.
I asked my wife and my sons to pick their top five favorite thematic cards.
This is a wonderful experience of Creative Life Curation!
