Themes of Practice: Concept, Activity, and Cognition

The Ecological Approach to Social Cognition

On September 2, 2023, my two sons attended Southwest Scholastic at the 89th Annual Southwest Open in Sheraton North Houston.

I made the above visual note in my notebook at the hotel. See the pictures of the event in the short note.

This article aims to offer more details of the visual note.

Contents

Part 1: The Story Behind the Visual Note

1.1 An Interdisciplinarity Thematic Curation
1.2 The Seed
1.3 The Model

Part 2: Perspectives and Ideas

2.1 The “Landscape” Perspective: General Terms
2.2 The “Field” Perspective: Orienting Concepts
2.3 The “Situation” Perspective: Situational Themes
2.4 The “Analysis” perspective: Properties of Category
2.5 The “Synthesis” perspective: Formation of Concept
2.6 The Logical Perspective: Defined Concepts
2.7 The Psychological Perspective: Spontaneous Concepts
2.8 The Cultural Perspective: Cultural Themes
2.9 The Scientific Perspective: Knowledge Themes

Part 3: Discussion

3.1 The Landscape of “Theme(Concept)”
3.2 The Meaning Matrix of “Theme(Concept)”
3.3 The Ecological Approach to Social Cognition

Part 1: The Story Behind the Visual Note

Why did I make the visual note on September 2, 2023?

It’s not an aha-movement. It’s part of a journey of exploring the theme of “Theme”.

1.1 An Interdisciplinarity Thematic Curation

On August 27, 2023, I wrote a long post to reflect on my journey of engaging with the theme of “themes” from 2017 to 2023.

The newest development of the journey is the connection between “Theme” and “Concept”.

For the Strategic Thematic Exploration framework, I made a distinction between “Theme” and “Concept”. While “Theme” emphasizes subjective experience and understanding, “Concept” is more about objective meaning and definition.

You can also find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Theme (Concept)” and its original Linkedin post.

On August 31, 2023, I wrote an article titled Value Circle #3: TALE as A Thematic Transformation Hub.

These articles represent the context of the diagram. My mental focus moves to a new creative space that connects “Theme”, “Concept”, and “Space”.

While I was working on making the final version of the diagram on Miro, I decided to name the diagram “Themes of Practice: Concept, Activity, and Cognition”.

We can see this title as a network of several Themes. In this way, these themes represent my subjective meanings with the following experiences:

• Themes of Practice: this refers to my 2021 book (draft) titled Themes of Practice: The Information Architecture of Social Life.
• Concept: this refers to the Concept Dynamics framework.
• Activity: this refers to Activity Theory, especially Andy Blunden’s approach.
• Cognition: Activity Theorist Clay Spinuzzi once suggested “social cognitive” as a direction for the future of activity theory.

If we see these words as general words or Concepts, then they refer to different fields of research and practice.

In other words, this title frames a new project: an Interdisciplinarity Thematic Curation project.

1.2 The Seed

It was triggered by a book titled The Big Book of Concepts (Gregpr L. Murphy).

It was triggered by Jeroen Coelen’s tweet about “concept” and our conversation around the tweet on August 28, 2023.

I shared Andy Blunden’s book Concepts: A Critical Approach with him.

He shared Gregory L. Murphy’s The Big Book of Concepts with me.

Several years ago, I read Gregory L. Murphy’s paper Polysemy and the Creation of Novel Word Meaning which is part of Creative Thought: An Investigation of Conceptual Structures and Processes.

Gregory L. Murphy and other authors of Creative Thought adopt the cognitive psychological perspective to research concepts, word meaning, and creativity.

I read papers and books about cognitive psychology from around 2014 to 2018. Around 2018, I moved to Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and Social Practice theories.

The Big Book of Concepts encourages me to return to the field of cognitive psychology, especially concept study.

On the night of September 1, 2023, I read The Big Book of Concept while my kids were playing soccer with their team members.

In Chapter 7, the author discusses one particular kind of category organization: the hierarchical structure of categories. He mentioned Piaget’s work on hierarchies.

Much of this section of the chapter will be devoted to discussing whether people really have and use such hierarchies. In order to discuss that, we need to specify what exactly counts as evidence for this hierarchical structure of concepts. Much work in developmental psychology has formed a very stringent set of criteria for this ability, based on the work of Piaget(Inhelder and Piaget 1964). However, Piaget’s assumptions were based on theories of logic rather than empirical observations of how people use concepts, and so they seem in retrospect to be too stringent. For example, Piaget believed that if Rachel knows that all terriers are dogs, then she should be able to answer questions of logic and numerical reasoning of the sort ‘‘Are all dogs terriers?’’ and ‘‘Are there more terriers or more dogs?’’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Piaget and other researchers found that young children could be quite bad at answering such questions.(p.202)

The difference between the logical perspective and the psychological perspective is quite interesting. So, I took a picture of the screen. See the picture below.

This is the seed of the above diagram “Themes of Practice: Concept, Activity, and Cognition”.

1.3 The Model

On September 2, 2023, my two sons attended Southwest Scholastic at the 89th Annual Southwest Open in Sheraton North Houston.

I made a visual note in my notebook at the hotel. See the pictures of the event in this post.

Initially, I wrote three keywords: Activity, Cognition, and Concept. Then, I quickly adopted a meta-diagram called Tripartness to develop my ideas.

The diagram below is an example of Tripartness.

You can find more details in the original article titled Career Curation: Curativity Theory for Personal Innovation.

The meta-diagram Tripartness is used to discover the relationship between three keywords by using eight thematic spaces. See the diagram below. Each closed space refers to a thematic space. We can assign one or more themes to a thematic space.

I only assigned one theme to #1, #2, #3, and #4.

• #1 = Theme
• #2 = Concept
• #3 = Activity
• #4 = Cognition

However, I assigned two themes to #5, #6, and #7

• #5 = The “Analysis” perspective + The “Synthesis” perspective
• #6 = The Logical Perspective + The Psychological Perspective
• $7 = The Cultural Perspective + The Scientific Perspective

In the past years, I often assigned one theme to #8. However, this time I assigned three themes to #8. I divided it into three levels. See the diagram below.

These three themes refer to three units of analysis

• Macro: The “Landscape” Perspective
• Meso: The “Field” Perspective
• Micro: The “Situation” Perspective

These three units of analysis are adopted from the Ecological Practice approach. I also applied them to Ecological Strategic Cognition.

Part 2: Perspectives and Ideas

What is the goal of this diagram?

In my recent projects and articles, I used a series of terms to discuss Themes and Concepts. I also adopted some related ideas from different fields of research and practice.

This diagram aims to offer a multiple-perspective framework for curating these ideas together. In other words, it calls me to run an Interdisciplinarity Thematic Curation project.

• The “Landscape” Perspective: General Terms
• The “Field” Perspective: Orienting Concepts
• The “Situation” Perspective: Situational Themes
• The “Analysis” perspective: Properties of Category
• The “Synthesis” perspective: Formation of Concept
• The Logical Perspective: Defined Concepts
• The Psychological Perspective: Spontaneous Concepts
• The Cultural Perspective: Cultural Themes
• The Scientific Perspective: Knowledge Themes

Part 2 offers more details about these ideas.

2.1 The “Landscape” Perspective: General Terms

The idea of “General Terms” refers to the pair of concepts of “Singular Terms” and “General Terms”. According to Wikipedia, “Singular terms are defined as expressions that purport to denote or designate particular individual people, places, or other objects. They contrast with general terms (such as “car” or “chair”) which can apply to more than one thing.” It is part of the field of analytic philosophy.

The “Singular Terms — General Terms” pair is similar to the “Langue — Parole” pair which is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Langue refers to the abstract system of language while parole means concrete speech.

I learned the “Langue — Parole” pair from Ping-keung Lui's theoretical sociology. Lui used “Langue (Language)” to refer to his theoretical sociology while “Parole (Speech)” refers to all empirical sociologies.

Inspired by Lui’s approach, I made the following “Universal Reference” diagram in Nov 2022.

At the level of “Langue(language)”, all concepts are “General Terms”. For example, the word “Mind” just means Mind. It doesn’t refer to a particular theoretical approach to Mind.

You can find more details in Diagram: A Universal Reference for Knowledge Engagement and Knowledge Engagement: The Concept of Mindset and Theoretical Integration.

2.2 The “Field” Perspective: Orienting Concepts

The term “Orienting Concepts” was coined by the sociologist and social theorist Derek Layder.

Derek Layder suggests using Orienting Concepts as the starting point to guide research, “Two important features of orienting concepts are their ‘two-sided’ nature and their reference to social processes. The Two-sided nature of orienting concepts concerns their dual reference to objective and subjective aspects of social life. A concern with social processes focuses on their ability to trace social activity and events over time and space.” (1998, p.101)

A great example of orienting concepts is “Career”, Layder pointed out, “The twin virtues of the concept of career stem from its theoretical relevance and the breadth of its empirical applicability. The empirical scope of the concept derives from its use outside as well as inside the context of work and occupations…the concept of career is potentially capable of addressing certain problems in social analysis. In particular, it could help to overcome certain divisions such as that between macro and micro analysis and between interpretive and institutional analysis (‘interactionist’ or ‘structural’ sociology). This is because, as I have said, the concept of career is capable of reaching into both objective and subjective aspects of social life. In these senses, the concept uniquely expresses the intertwining of individual experience and the collective forces that constitute what we generally mean by the term ‘society’. Thus, career is a step towards overcoming the false distinction implicit in the old argument about the ‘individual versus society’.”(1993, pp.131–132)

In 2020, I followed Layder’s suggestion and used “Project” as an Orienting Concept for the book Project-oriented Activity Theory.

On Sept 1, 2023, I started working on a project about “Mindset” because it is a great orienting concept.

You can find more details about “Orienting Concepts” in Knowledge Discovery: The “Concepts — Notions” Mapping and Activity U (VIII): Project as a Unit of Activity.

2.3 The “Situation” Perspective: Situational Themes

I recently made a distinction between “Situational Themes” and “Creative Themes” for the “Creative Life Curation” method.

Situational Themes are meaningful keywords about immediate life experiences while Creative Themes are abstract themes about knowledge projects.

From June 24 to July 3, 2023, I had a wonderful 10-day road trip with my wife and two little sons. 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 used the ECHO Way model to reflect on the trip and named it The ECHO Trip.

I created several Thematic Network Diagrams for “The ECHO Trip” project. One diagram is about ECHOes between Situational Themes and Creative Themes. See the diagram below.

The left column lists 21 situational themes while the right column lists a set of creative themes which come from my four knowledge projects.

The middle column uses a few words as clues of connections between Situational Themes and Creative Themes.

For example, the Ecological Practice Approach is my primary knowledge project. I list five creative themes about the approach. There are eight situational themes that connect to these five themes. See the diagram below.

We should notice that one Situational Theme could connect to more than one Creative Theme. Also, more than one Situational Theme could connect to one Creative Theme.

The above picture is the Thematic Card of # 6 Tree or Chair. It 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 call Concept Ecology.

You can find more details about “Situational Themes” and “Creative Themes” in The ECHO Trip: A 10-day Road Trip and Creative Life Curation, TALE: One 10-day Road Trip, 21 Thematic Cards, and Situational Note-taking: Capture Significant Insights Outside the Room.

2.4 The “Analysis” perspective: Properties of Category

The “Analysis” perspective refers to contemporary cognitive psychology’s view on concepts. If we adopt this view, we should give a bundle of attributes or features to a concept and make a definition.

In The Big Book of Concepts, Gregory Murphy associates Concepts with Categories.

In general, I try to use the word concepts to talk about mental representations of classes of things, and categories to talk about the classes themselves. (2004, p.5)

As a core idea of cognitive psychology, the term Mental Representations indicates two distinct worlds: a world of mental objects and a world of material objects. Under this view, categories are about sorting things in the world of material objects while concepts are mental objects of categories.

According to Andy Blunden, the assumption behind Categories is “…the objective world is arbitrarily atomistic, being composed of individual entities, and further that these individual entities in turn can be conceived as objects which are exhausted without remainder by their attributes (or “features”). ” (2012, P.12)

Gregory Murphy introduces three general theoretical approaches to studying Concepts in the field of cognitive psychology:

• The Prototype View

One of the main critics of the classical view of concepts was Eleanor Rosch, who provided much of the crucial evidence that revealed the shortcomings of a definitional approach to concepts. (P.41)

A number of readers interpreted Rosch as suggesting that every category is represented by a single prototype or best example. That is, perhaps your category of dogs is represented by a single ideal dog, which best embodies all the attributes normally found in dogs. (P.41)

The idea that a single prototype could represent a whole category is questionable…In short, the notion of a single prototype as a category representation, which I’ll call the best example idea, has not been very widely adopted. Instead, the prototype view proposed by Rosch has most often been interpreted as a summary representation that is a description of the category as a whole, rather than describing a single, ideal member. (P.41)

… many theorists assume that the prototype is the single best example, rather than a list of features, even though these models have very different properties, for real-life categories, at least. (P.45)

• The Exemplar View

The theory of concepts first proposed by Medin and Schaffer (1978) is in many respects radically different from prior theories of concepts.

In the exemplar view, the idea that people have a representation that somehow encompasses an entire concept is rejected. That is, one’s concept of dogs is not a definition that includes all dogs, nor is it a list of features that are found to greater or lesser degrees in dogs. Instead, a person’s concept of dogs is the set of dogs that the person remembers.

In some sense, there is no real concept (as normally conceived of), because there is no summary representation that stands for all dogs. (P.49)

• The Knowledge Approach

The knowledge approach argues that concepts are part of our general knowledge about the world. We do not learn concepts in isolation from everything else (as is the case in many psychology experiments); rather, we learn them as part of our overall understanding of the world around us.

When we learn concepts about animals, this information is integrated with our general knowledge about biology, about behavior, and other relevant domains (perhaps cuisine, ecology, climate, and so on). This relation works both ways: Concepts are influenced by what we already know, but a new concept can also effect a change in our general knowledge.

In general, then, the knowledge approach emphasizes that concepts are part and parcel of your general knowledge of the world, and so there is pressure for concepts to be consistent with whatever else you know. In order to maintain such consistency, part of categorization and other conceptual processes may be a reasoning process that infers properties or constructs explanations from general knowledge. (PP.60–61)

Cognitive Psychologists tend to use common objects to research Concepts, you can find more examples in The Big Book of Concepts.

2.5 The “Synthesis” perspective: Formation of Concept

The “Synthesis” perspective refers to the “Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky” account of “Concept” which was introduced in Andy Blunden’s book Concepts: A Critical Approach.

Andy Blunden also used “Formation of Concept” to describe the core ideas of the “Synthesis” perspective.

As mentioned above, If we follow contemporary psychology and formal logic, we should give a bundle of attributes or features to a concept and make a definition.

Hegel’s philosophy and dialectical logic focus on the internal development of a concept. According to Andy Blunden (2012, pp.156–157), Hegel uses the following three movements to describe the internal development of the Concept:

• Universal: the Universal Concept is what is represented by a word (or in general, the sign for a concept) taken alone, outside of any determination or context of use. The meaning is entirely ‘in itself’, waiting to be developed, but at the same time is ‘pure’, in that every utterance is identical…Hegel links the Universal Concept to Identity because it is taken to be self-identical.
• Particular: the Particular Concept is a practice which differentiates one kind of the Concept, one genus of the species from another through its inclusion and differentiation in a system of social practice. The Universal Concept can only come to reality through particularity, by determining the Universal…While it is an error to represent the Concept by means of some finite collection of exemplars, the Universal can exist only in and through some exemplars.
• Individual: the Individual Concept is the sole ground of the concept, in and through which alone the Concept can exist. The Individual Concept is the limit case of the Particular Concept, where it is not just some things, but this thing which is the Concept, the ground of all generalisation…Individual, reduces the Concept to a common element linking the individuals. This is an extremely poor representation of a Concept…

In March 2021, I adopted Hegel’s idea to develop a framework called Concept-fit for discussing Platform Innovation.

For Platform Innovation, the Universal form of concept includes Theoretical level technological concepts and Collective level sociocultural concepts. The Individual form of concept includes Operational level technological concepts and Individual level sociocultural concepts. The Particular form of concept includes Product and Project. Here we can understand Product as Platform and Project as Platform-based activity or practice because Project-oriented Activity Theory uses Project as the unit of analysis of Activity.

You can find more details in Platform Innovation as Concept-fit.

In 2022, I used the “Formation of Concept” idea to guide the development of the concept of “Life Discovery”. You can find a review about the journey in Life Discovery: “Formation of Concepts” and “Themes of Practice”.

From 2022 to 2023, I also applied the same perspective to develop the concept of “Knowledge Center”. You can find more details in CALL: How to Grow A Knowledge Enterprise.

2.6 The Logical Perspective: Defined Concepts

As mentioned above, Gregory L. Murphy mentioned Jean Piaget’s work on hierarchies of concept in Chapter 7 of The Big Book of Concepts.

Much of this section of the chapter will be devoted to discussing whether people really have and use such hierarchies. In order to discuss that, we need to specify what exactly counts as evidence for this hierarchical structure of concepts.

Much work in developmental psychology has formed a very stringent set of criteria for this ability, based on the work of Piaget(Inhelder and Piaget 1964). However, Piaget’s assumptions were based on theories of logic rather than empirical observations of how people use concepts, and so they seem in retrospect to be too stringent.

For example, Piaget believed that if Rachel knows that all terriers are dogs, then she should be able to answer questions of logic and numerical reasoning of the sort ‘‘Are all dogs terriers?’’ and ‘‘Are there more terriers or more dogs?’’ Perhaps not surprisingly, Piaget and other researchers found that young children could be quite bad at answering such questions.(p.202)

The difference between the logical perspective and the psychological perspective is quite interesting.

I recently made a distinction between Spontaneous Concept System and Defined Concept System in order to discuss the Concept-fit framework and Platform Innovation. I roughly list several criteria to compare these two ideas. See the table below. Some criteria are used to discuss other topics. You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Spontaneous Concept System”.

In a general sense, “Defined Concepts” can be understood from the logical perspective while “Spontaneous Concepts” can be understood from the psychological perspective.

For the Concept-fit framework, I used “Defined Concepts” to refer to concepts or terms defined by platform owners and designers.

For example, the screenshot below is about a Web 3.0 platform.

The owner of the platform clearly understands the following terms and the complicated relationships between these terms:

• DID Wallet
• DID
• Profile
• Passport

These terms are “Defined Concepts” which represent a logical structure of the platform. The team of the platform has to rely on these “Defined Concepts” to guide their development work. The third-party developers have to read documents about these “Defined Concepts” in order to understand the systematic design of the platform.

2.7 The Psychological Perspective: Spontaneous Concepts

The Psychological Perspective emphasizes individual differences in understanding concepts. Spontaneous Concepts are related to this perspective.

Jean Piaget made a distinction between two types of children’s tendency of concept formation: Spontaneous and non-spontaneous.

• Spontaneous conception represents a child’s original reflections, which are decisively not influenced by adults.
• Non-spontaneous conceptions are internalized from family, school, and conversation, that a child attends to.

Lev Vygotsky made a similar distinction with two terms: Spontaneous Concepts and Scientific Concepts. For example, “Archimedes’s Law” is a scientific concept while “Brother” is a spontaneous concept

Andy Blunden points out an essential fact about spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts.

One of the most difficult questions in the study of concepts is that of the relation of a concept to its definition, and it is this relation which marks perhaps the clearest distinction between spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts. In the case of everyday concepts, the definition lies only at the end of a protracted process of development. In the case of scientific concepts, development begins with learning the verbal definiton.(2012, p.254)

The Spontaneous Concept System is based on a person’s subjective experience with a thing while the Defined Concept System is based on the verbal definition of the thing.

In the field of Developmental Psychology and Education, some people pay attention to the “wrong” aspect of Spontaneous Concepts. If we detach it from education and attach it to the field of Creativity, Design, and Innovation, we can pay attention to the “personal subjective experience” aspect of Spontaneous Concepts.

Let’s return to the web3 platform.

In TALE: A Possible Theme called “Concept Choices”, I mentioned two projects I am recently working on:

• A Strategic Design Research project about a web3 platform.
• A Creative Life Study project about Ping-keung Lui’s theoretical sociology.

I have used Lui’s theoretical sociology as an example for the theme of “Concept Choices”. Now I am going to use the web3 platform as an example of “Spontaneous Concept System”.

The web3 platform recently launched a new product that aims to enable non-technical users to create, launch, and host their own decentralized applications (DApps). We may use the “No-code DApps platform” to frame the new product.

I have 0 knowledge of web3 and DApps. The first step of the Strategic Design Research project is to directly use the platform to create a simple DApp without formal training. I also didn’t read their HELP documents and DEVELOPER documentation.

I just learned some new knowledge about web3 and DID (Decentralized Identify) by using their platform to create a simple website with several pages. Sometimes I searched some keywords on the web in order to learn some new terms. Sometimes I just use the Try-and-Fail approach to figure out the real meanings of some new terms.

It’s clear that there is a gap between the platform owner’s Concept System and my Concept System. As the designer of the platform, the owner clearly understands the following terms and the complicated relationships between these terms:

• DID Wallet
• DID
• Profile
• Passport

However, I have to figure out the following questions:

• What is the difference between DID Wallet and DID?
• I can see the Wallet on an app on my mobile phone. But, where is my DID?
• What does Switch DID mean? Do I have more than one DID?
• What’s the difference between Passport and DID?

By reading some documents, I can understand their design decision about separating Social Profiles and User Accounts.

The platform used a multi-layer approach to design its DID system. It’s fine to directly push this complicated structure to Developers because Developers can read documents.

Now we can use “Spontaneous Concept System” to describe my concept system. See the diagram below.

As mentioned above, my Focus (Situational Theme Network) is on the new terms I have to learn.

• DID Wallet
• Passport
• Social Profile

I list three themes in the box of Landscape (Relevant Theme Network):

• Personas Dynamics: A theme about Self, Role, and Identity. you can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Possible Personas”.
• Social (Software) Design: I have been fascinated by social software design for many years.
• Decentralized Knowledge Badges (DKBs): a new idea about applying NFT technology to Knowledge Badges.

My Relevant Theme Network indicates some potential opportunities for using the platform to explore my interests. In the other way, I use these interests to help me understand the meaning of Defined Concept System.

Moreover, we can dive into my Backstage (Deep Theme Network). Why do I consider “Microspace” and “Knowledge Engagement”?

Many years ago, I used “microspace” as my online ID and URL address for my first blog. The term “microspace” refers to my vision of “Mass Customization of Self”. Inspired by B. Joseph Pine II’s 1993 book Mass Customization: the new frontier in business competition, I used “microspace” to describe an online space where people can offer opportunities to others. A person can have more than one “microspace”. A blog is a simple format of a “microspace”.

In fact, I didn’t use “microspace” to describe a particular technology such as blog. I wanted to use it to describe a new possibility of social reality.

The theme of “Knowledge Engagement” was born recently. I started using it last year. Why do I add it to my “Spontaneous Concept System” about DID? Because “Knowledge Engagement” is related to the journey of building a knowledge enterprise.

If we connect “Knowledge Engagement” with web3 technology and DID, then we can imagine a new vision of Decentralized Knowledge Innovation.

How can we use Decentralized Technology to enable Knowledge Innovation?

This is my Spontaneous Concept System about “DID” in May 2023.

You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Spontaneous Concept System”.

2.8 The Cultural Perspective: Cultural Themes

In 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity and developed a theory about general curation practice. One concept of Curativity Theory is “Themes of Practice”.

In the past years, the concept of “Themes of Practice” grew into a theoretical approach and led to TALE Center. TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. TALE was launched as a new knowledge center for the Thematic Engagement project in Jan 2023.

In order to work on the Themes of Practice approach and TALE Center, I made a distinction between Cultural Themes and Knowledge Themes.

The distinction between Cultural Themes and Knowledge Themes is similar to the distinction between Spontaneous Concepts and Scientific Concepts.

You can find more details in TALE: Find 100 Cultural Themes for City Curation.

2.9 The Scientific Perspective: Knowledge Themes

Knowledge Themes are similar to Scientific Concepts. However, Knowledge Themes are more flexible than Scientific Concepts, especially the Early Discovery of the journey of knowledge engagement.

I Strategic Thematic Exploration and Conceptual Elaboration as two phases of EARLY DISCOVERY of the journey of knowledge Engagement. See the diagram below.

In the Thematic Exploration phase, I use “Knowledge Themes” as the primary term.

In the Conceptual Elaboration phase, I use “Spontaneous Concept/Defined Concept/Scientific Concept” as primary terms.

I use “Strategic Thematic Exploration” to frame a creative space for exploring the strategic intent with the thematic analysis methods, especially for knowledge engagement.

I consider “From Theme to Framework” as a significant early phase for the journey of knowledge engagement. There are six stages in the phase.

• A Possible Theme without Clue
• A Possible Theme with Clue
• A Primary Theme without related themes
• A Primary Theme with its network
• A Knowledge Concept with a working definition
• A Knowledge Framework with a set of concepts

You can find more details in Thematic Exploration: The Early Discovery of Knowledge Engagement (book, v1).

I also use Knowledge Themes as the center of Knowledge Discovery Canvas.

The Knowledge Discovery Canvas is designed with the THEORY — PRACTICE dimension and the END — MEANS dimension. I also consider the ENTER — EXIT dimension and the INDIVIDUAL — COLLECTIVE dimension. The canvas also has two nested squares which divide the thematic space into two sub-spaces: INNER space and 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

As a tool to understand Developing Tacit Knowledge, I use the Primary Knowledge Theme to define each case of Knowledge Discovery Activity.

You can find more details in Knowledge Discovery (Book).

Part 3: Discussion

The above sections give a multiple-perspective framework for an Interdisciplinarity Thematic Curation project.

You can use the above 10 perspectives to guide your own learning and exploration of Concepts and Themes.

My primary interest is Knowledge Engagement which refers to knowledge curation and knowledge creation. Traditional theories of Concepts tend to focus on common objects. My primary interest in Concepts is about Creating New Concepts. In the past several years, I worked on several projects about Creating New Concepts and Themes.

I also pay attention to the “Theme — Concept” transformation because it is the core idea of the Thematic Exploration Framework.

3.1 The Landscape of “Theme(Concept)”

Based on the above multiple-perspective discussion, I used the Universal Reference diagram to make the attached framework: The Landscape of Theme(Concept)”. See the diagram.

There are two types of Researchers, they hold two views of concepts:

• Concept-as-Object
• Concept-as-Process

I use “Self-as-Object” and “Self-as-Process” to discuss the concept of “Self” in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Life (Self)”.

Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics. Langue refers to the abstract system of language while parole means concrete speech.

From the view of “Self-as-Object”, there are a set of terms which is called “Self-concept”. We can place these self-concepts in the layer of “Langue (language).”

From the view of “Self-as-Process” (Self-as-Subject), the self can be seen in a process of dynamic development. At different times, we see a concrete content of an abstract Self-concept. So, we can place “Self-as-Process” in the layer of “Parole (speech)”.

Moreover, we can see a distinction between Researchers and Actors. While Researchers only care about the above two views, Actors only consider the third view: “Myself”.

From the perspective of researchers, “Myself” is a mystery for scientific work. They have to build a “DATA — HYPOTHESIS” formula in order to turn the “Myself” from original experience into scientific knowledge such as “Self-as-Process” or “Self-as-Object”.

From the perspective of a particular actor, “Myself” is not a mystery. He/she has his/her own Spontaneous Concept System of “Myself”. However, “Self-as-Process” and “Self-as-Object” refer to a large Scientific Defined Concept System.

I applied the same logic to “Concept-as-Object” and “Concept-as-Process”. While “Concept-as-Object” is associated with the “Analysis” perspective and Properties of Category, “Concept-as-Process” refers to the “Synthesis” perspective and Formation of Concept.

There are two types of Actors, they hold two views of themes:

• Creative Themes
• Situational Themes

These two views of Themes set the foundation of two views of Concepts.

3.2 The Meaning Matrix of “Theme(Concept)”

The four types of actors and four types of terms form a matrix of meaning. See the diagram below.

The above diagram lists four types of actors:

• Theoretical Researchers
• Empirical Researchers
• Professionals
• Actors

The four types of terms are defined as the following words:

• General Terms
• Concepts
• Creative Themes
• Situational Themes

I also applied the same method to discuss the concept of Mindset. You can find more details in Knowledge Engagement: The Concept of Mindset and Theoretical Integration.

Why do we have to think in this way?

A simple answer is what theoretical sociologist Thomas J. Fararo and his student John Skvoretz called “a hierarchical meaning control system” in an article titled Methods and Problems of Theoretical Integration and the Principle of Adaptively Rational Action (1993).

According to Fararo and Skvoretz, “Calling this a meaning control hierarchy is intended to emphasize that higher levels constitute commitments that ‘inform’ — enable and constrain — the lower level activities or discoveries.”

Different theorists have different models of their “hierarchical meaning control system” with different terms. For example, Fararo and Skvoretz suggested four levels:

• General presuppositions
• Representation principles
• Theoretical Models
• Invariants

The benefits of using the same “hierarchical meaning control system” for theoretical creators in the same field are invaluable and critical to growing public knowledge because it offers a systematic view, logical coherence, and a common language for making, sharing, and curating abstract theoretical knowledge.

The Meaning Matrix of “Theme(Concept)” is based on the Universal Reference diagram which offers two dimensions of a “meaning control system”:

• The Vertical group refers to the Degrees of Abstraction of “Knowledge”
• The Horizontal group refers to the Situations of Activity of “Engagement”

The Universal Reference diagram was born from a typology of diagrams. Now we have a version of Universal Reference for discussing Concepts and Themes.

3.3 The Ecological Approach to Social Cognition

As mentioned above, Activity Theorist Clay Spinuzzi once suggested “social cognitive” as a direction for the future of activity theory.

Andy Blunden’s approach to Activity Theory and Concept Theory has offered us a great solution. Activity and Concept are two major aspects of social life and social cognition.

From the perspective of the Ecological Practice Approach, I’d like to work in this direction with the above ideas and the concept of “Thematic Space”.

In July 2022, I wrote a thesis titled Project Engagement: Life, History, and Multiverse. Part 5 of the thesis is the outcome of re-learning Activity Theory. I discovered the following pairs of keywords for discussions:

• Concepts and Themes
• Project and Platform
• Culture and History
• Context and Settings

Finally, I made a “meta-framework” for the Project Engagement approach (v2.0). See the picture below.

The meta-framework is formed with two sets of keywords:

• Activity, Concept, Culture: this set of keywords is discovered from Andy Blunden’s approach.
• Actor, Settings, Society: this set of keywords is discovered from the Project Engagement approach.

This meta-framework considers Thematic Spaces as the primary concept. It also has a slogan:

Life = Projects = Thematic Spaces = Events = History

Moreover, this new approach emphasizes “Moving between Thematic Spaces”, not the definition of Thematic Spaces. If we apply this idea to discuss Social Cognition, we can see two types of moves:

• Mental Moves
• Social Moves

I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 to discuss some ideas related to Affordance, a core idea of Ecological Psychology.

Affordance means potential action opportunities offered by environments. I want to highlight the meaning and value of actual action itself, however, the term Affordance only refers to potential actions. Thus, I coined the term Attachance to emphasize the potential opportunities offered by actual actions, especially the attaching act and the detaching act.

In July 2023, I finished the “Mental Moves” knowledge project and edited a possible book titled Mental Moves: The Attachance Approach to Ecological Creative Cognition.

The “Social Moves” knowledge project used “Social Territory” as the primary concept.

If we put “Mental Moves” and “Social Moves” together, we see a new unit of analysis of Social Cognition. While “Social Moves” are about Social Actions, “Mental Moves” are about related Mental Activities.

Social Cognition = Social Moves (Mental Moves)

At the methodological level, I adopted the Optimal Context Canvas as an operational framework for studying Social Moves.

The Optimal Context Canvas offers the following four areas of Social Territory:

• Structural Dynamics: social structure
• Cultural Significance: social discourse
• Embedded Activity: situated activities.
• Project Engagement: goal-oriented projects

The Optimal Context Canvas presents 16 blocks that can be seen as thematic spaces. Social Moves can be understood as moving between these thematic spaces.

The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and social practice theories. It considers Experiences, Actions, and Social Context.

You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Theme (Concept)”, TALE: A Journey of Engaging with the Theme of “Themes” (2017–2023), and TALE: The Territory of Concepts.