TALE: A Possible Theme called “The Footbook”

A New Container of Knowledge Curation

The above picture was designed to represent a possible theme called “The Footbook” on January 22, 2023.

• Name: The Footbook
• Clue: A New Container of Knowledge Curation
• Type: knowledge theme
• Contributors: Tom Bray, Carlos E. Perez
• Reference: Expansive Activity Analysis, Strategic Thematic Exploration, Design as Creative Life
• Related Themes: Theory-based Reflection, Continuous Curation, Founder as Curator, How AI Curate, Context (Mind), Life (Self),

On July 20, 2023, Carlos E. Perez published a tweet about affordance and ecological psychology.

I replied to the above tweet with several tweets about Ecological Psychology and my “Container Thinking”.

Tom Bray replied to my tweet with the following picture:

The “spilling space” reminds me of Edge Effects in Ecology. The Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) also comes to mind as well as Kauffman’s adjacent possible and the book Liminal Thinking by Gray. And this picture of my garden containers might interest you as well!

Everything flows. This design allows the water to flow in its natural direction. The bottle sits inside a buried clay pot (Container 3) that slows the flow, letting the roots absorb the water at their own pace. Using a bag allows the plants to be positioned close to the flow.

Fundamentally I wanted a way to teach my kids how I think about systems. I think of it as a Boundary Object from sociology — something they can connect with at their level but can lead in many directions and to deeper levels of understanding.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0038038510387196

It surprised me! This is an amazing CREATIVE ACTION!

Three years ago, I wrote an article titled The NICE Way and Creative Actions. It was inspired by a Creative Action called the BED Talks challenge.

The BED Talk challenge was initiated by the speakers and authors David Rendall and Stan Phelps. The idea behind a BED Talk is to share a short, unscripted video sharing something helpful…recorded from your bed since you’re (hopefully) at home.

Tom Bray’s story inspired me to anticipate a new project: curating a series of stories of CREATIVE ACTIONS and editing a new book.

I replied to Tom Bray with the following tweet.

Wow! This is a great story. Would you mind writing a blog post or a long story about it? I’d like to collect this story for a possible book titled CREATION ACTIONS. p.s. “creative action” is the first unit of analysis of my CREATIVE LIFE THEORY.

What a meaningful small talk!

From Handbook to Footbook

I am not a scholar. However, I often read academic papers and books. One type of academic book is Handbook which is a collection of papers representing the landscape of a particular field or subfield.

The conversation inspired me to imagine a new possible medium:

Footbook

While Handbooks are collections of papers written by scholars, Footbooks are collections of stories written by ordinary people. Both can represent theoretical concepts.

I am not sure if this idea is good, so I asked ChatGPT.

Why do academics use Handbook to name their collections of papers?

See the answer below.

I asked the second question:

Can I use the term “Footbook” to name a new medium that collects articles written by ordinary people with the purpose of representing some knowledge concepts through telling real stories?

ChatGPT is so sweet because it also offers advice on availability checks.

Then, I did it. I just typed “Footbook” in Google. See the results:

Wow! I love Dr. Seuss. I have mentioned the Celebrate Dr. Seuss! event in the Re-Engagement Project.

Now I have the second reason to use the name “Footbook”!!!

Three Examples of Footbooks

Let’s use it!

I will be the editor of three possible Footbooks. The first one is about the concept of “Affordance”.

I have mentioned the Affordance Analysis project many times (1, 2).

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 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.

Now we can use The Footbook of Affordance to publish the outcome of the Empirical Analysis of my five years of observation.

The second Footbook is about the concept of “Self-reference”. There are three types of Self-reference:

• Destructive Self-reference
• Neutral Self-reference
• Constructive Self-reference

I particularly like the third one: Constructive Self-reference. Moreover, I want to apply it to my work and life.

In the past several years, I found that it was so hard to apply it in real-life practice. In contrast, we can frequently use the 2x2 matrix in our daily work and life.

In the past several years, I used the concept of Constructive Self-reference three times in my journey of knowledge engagement.

• 2019: Curativity Theory > Knowledge Curation
• 2022: Project Engagement > Life Discovery
• 2021: Anticipatory Activity System (AAS)

I have written an article about my experiences using the concept of Self-reference. If we can collect more stories, then we can edit a Footbook about it.

The third Footbook is about the concept of “Creative Actions”.

A New Container of Knowledge Curation

For knowledge curators, the Footbook is a new container of Knowledge Curation.

Most academic theoretical concepts are not useful for practitioners because they are developed for dealing with theoretical issues. However, some academic theoretical concepts are really useful if they offer brand-new perspectives.

Footbooks can be used to study the THEORY — PRACTICE Gap which is the mission of my Knowledge Curation project.

Moreover, Footbooks can be used to study the “Spontaneous Concept System”.

I use Spontaneous Concepts to refer to “Everyday Concepts”. Developmental psychologists use Spontaneous Concepts to discuss the development of a child’s cognitive structure and skills. In general, Spontaneous Concepts refer to “conceptions about the world that we form without any formal education”.

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.

The child formulates Archimedes’s law better than he formulates his definition of what a brother is. This obviously reflects the different developmental paths that have led to the formation of these concepts. The child has learned the concept of “Archimedes law” differently than he has learned the concept of “brother.” The child knew what a brother was, and passed through many stages in the development of this knowledge, before he learned to define the word “brother” (if he ever had the occasion to learn this).

The development of the concept, “brother”, did not begin with a teacher’s explanation or with a scientific formulation. This concept is saturated with the child’s own rich personal experience. It had already passed through a significant part of its developmental course and had exhausted much of the purely empirical content it contains before the child encourntered it in definition. Of course, this was not the case with the concept that underlies Archimedes’ law (LSVCW, v.1:178, cited in Andy Blunden, 2012, p.254)

Vygotsky uses “Brother” as an example of Spontaneous Concepts.

As adults, we can pay attention to abstract concepts such as “Systems” and “Boundary Objects”.