TALE: Idea Engagement, Members of Projects, and A New Canvas

Oliver Ding

Published in

TALE500

12 min readFeb 15, 2023

More ideas about the possible theme called “Idea Engagement”

On Feb 9, 2023, I shared a new perspective on Idea Generation in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”.

In fact, the article is part of a series article about “Product as Engagement”.

Feb 3 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “The Hierarchy of Fit”
Feb 6 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “Product Engagement”
Feb 7 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “Business as Engagement”
Feb 8 —TALE: A Possible Theme called “The Project — Portfolio Gap”
Feb 9 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”
Feb 12 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “Product as Thing”
Feb 13 — TALE: A Possible Theme called “Blade with Blood”

There is a deep theme behind these articles: Product-centered Business Development. I adopted two theoretical approaches to develop these themes.

The “Ecological Practice” Approach > “Product as Thing”
The “Project Engagement” Approach > “Business as Engagement”

The theme of “Business as Engagement” connects “Activity System” and “Project Engagement” with business development. There are three theoretical resources behind the theme:

Activity-based view, Activity System, and Value Chain (Michael E. Porter, 1985)
The Activity System Model (Yrjö Engeström, 1987)
Activity as Formation of Concept, and Project as a unit of Activity (Andy Blunden, 2010, 2012, 2014)

I also use the Project Engagement approach (v2.1) to define three keywords, six units of analysis, and six guiding questions. In this way, we can start a new journey of knowledge engagement with a rough framework.

You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Business as Engagement”.

The above diagram leads to three types of projects.

Project 1: the project that aims to discover new ideas for business development.
Project 2: the project that belongs to daily work activities of the Business Value Chain.
Project 3: the project that aims to turn ideas behind business into concepts for the development of culture and society.

We can use both Michael E. Porter’s Activity-based view and Yrjö Engeström’s Activity System Model for Project 2, we can use Andy Blunden’s Project-oriented Activity Theory for Project 3.

Finally, we can use “Strategic Discovery” to name Project 1.

In TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”. I discussed these three types of projects about idea generation. This article offers more details about this theme.

Idea Engagement and Members of Projects

The diagram below roughly list several roles that participate in three types of projects. I want to use this diagram to discuss different members’ positions and preferences.

Project 1 = Strategic Discovery

Product Strategists
Creative Designers
Talent Engineers
UX Researchers

Project 3 = Concept Development

Visionary Founders
Passionate Users
Creative Designers
Product Strategists

Project 2 = Work Development

Product Strategists
Talent Engineers
Creative Designers
UX Researchers

There are two roles who participate in all three types of projects: Creative Designers and Product Strategists.

Other roles only participate in one or two types of projects. We can see structural tensions in their preferences.

Visionary Founders v.s. UX Researchers
Passionate Users v.s. Talent Engineers

In 1998, Bruce Ahistrand, Henry Mintzbery, and Joseph Lampel published a book titled Strategy Safari: A Guided Tour Through the Wilds of Strategic Management. The authors introduce several schools of strategic thinking. I will select two schools for the present discussion.

The Design School > UX Researchers
The Entrepreneurial School > Visionary Founders

According to the authors, “The design school, if not the planning and positioning schools, took formal leadership seriously, rooting strategy formation in the mental processes of the chief executive. That person is the “architect” of strategy. But the design school stopped short of building a cult around that leadership. Indeed, by stressing the need for a conceptual framework, and by dismissing intuition, it specifically sought to avoid the softer, more personalized, and idiosyncratic elements of leadership.” (p.129)

Some UX Researchers are trained social scientists or scientific psychologists, other UX Researchers are self-taught talents. Both tend to work on research users’ behavior with scientific methods. They should belong to “the design school” because their job is to contribute objective insights in order to avoid cognitive bias.

On the other hand, “The entrepreneurial school has done exactly the opposite. Not only has this school focused the strategy formation process exclusively on the single leader, but it has also stressed the most innate of mental states and processes — intuition, judgment, wisdom, experience, insight. This promotes a view of strategy as perspective, associated with image and sense of direction, namely vision.” (p.129)

Visionary Founders tend to work with “an inspiration and a sense of what needs to be done, a guiding idea”. This idea is not an articulated plan, but a kind of image. It highly relies on business imagination. The authors use “vision” to name this kind of idea, “That leaves it flexible so that the leader can adapt it to his or her experiences. This suggests that entrepreneurial strategy is both deliberate and emergent: deliberate in its broad lines and sense of direction, emergent in its details so that these can be adapted en route. The accompanying box develops the metaphor of strategic thinking as ‘seeing.’” (p.130)

We also have to notice the difference between New Business Creation, New Product Development, and New Feature Development. It’s a nested structure:

Business [Product (Feature)]

A new business is created by a Visionary Founder with an idea. If the business grows, then the team grows too. UX Researchers will join the business and contribute to new product development and new feature development.

In a Linkedin post, Juan J Ramirez claims that “UX is rarely the main value proposition of a successful product.”

The value a product provides it’s usually related to its ability to solve a problem for an audience. Good UX is often about enhancing the product’s core value.
Most product categories are driven by other significant forces such as:
- Price (I don’t want to pay a lot for this software)
- Distribution (I don’t know any other software with this functionality)
- Straight product-market fit (this particular software has the one feature I need).
As products become more successful, it’s more likely that they will start competing in UX because new competitors will see this as an attackable vector of your value proposition. They will attempt to gain market share by providing the same core benefits but with an enhanced experience.

One good news for UX Researchers is that they can be Visionary Founders too.

If they find some invaluable insights about products and markets, and their insights are not adopted by the business owner, they could create new businesses with some social support.

The “Passionate Users v.s. Talent Engineers” tension is simple because it is about “internal v.s. external” and “use v.s. make”. Passionate Users care about what they want while Talent Engineers pay attention to what they can do actually.

I think the above three-project topology is a great tool for solving these tensions. Each type of project has its own logic.

The Lifeworld of Product Team

A related idea is a diagram about the product team and their activities.

The above diagram uses the Tripartness meta-diagram to map the Product Team. In 2021, I also used the Tripartness meta-diagram to rethink Strategic Value Proposition.

I made the Tripartness diagram in 2018 when I created the Ecological Zone framework. The original Ecological Zone Framework considers three Subjects, three Zones, and one shared Theme. In order to make the meta-diagram, I rename these elements with more abstract words such as Corner, Zone, Center, and Context.

In order to understand the product team, I select four roles:

Leader
Designer
Strategist
Engineer

Originally, I want to make a diagram to discuss the difference between Designer and other roles. So this diagram is not an ideal representation of the full function of a product team. For example, it doesn't contain marketing and selling.

Since Idea Engagement is about the early stage of a business, we don’t have to discuss marketing and selling.

The above diagram identifies ten activities:

Communication
Decision-making
Market research
Analysis
Strategic design
Design-led strategy
Aesthetics
Design system
Design Leadership
Technology

Again, you see four items about Design because this diagram was developed about designers’ Aesthetics.

You can find more roles and functions in the table below. It was quoted from an item titled “New Product Development” on Wikipedia.

The major difference between my diagram and the above table is the function of product marketing. As mentioned above, Idea Engagement is the early stage of Product Development. My diagram is only for discussing Idea Engagement.

Idea Engagement Canvas

In TALE: A Possible Theme called “Idea Engagement”, I introduced three types of projects with the following keywords:

Project 2: Incremental Innovation and Activity System
Disrupted Activity and Normal Activity
Project 3: Radical Innovation and Social Change
Object and Concept

These keywords inspired me to develop a tool called Idea Engagement Canvas. See the diagram below.

The above Idea Engagement Canvas is based on a meta-canvas called “Thematic Space Canvas”. See the diagram below.

In 2022, I used the above Thematic Space Canvas to develop several canvases for Developing Tacit Knowledge. You can find more details in Slow Cognition: A Meta-canvas for Developing Tacit Knowledge.

A meta-canvas is an abstract canvas that doesn’t tie to any domain. The goal of designing a meta-canvas is to highlight a unique spatial structure for designing domain-specific canvases.

I use abstract terms such as “area”, “dimension”, “block”, and “theme” for the Thematic Space Canvas.

The Thematic Space Canvas is not a simple 2x2 matrix for building a typology, but a multiple-dimension model for visualizing a holistic view to sense-make a dynamic meaningful whole. You can find more details here: The Notion of Thematic Spaces.

The Thematic Space Canvas’ spatial structure is designed with the following aspects:

Four Significant Areas
Four Dimensions
Two Subspaces: Inner Space and Outer Space
Eight Pairs of Blocks
A Primary Theme

The uniqueness of Thematic Space Canvas is that it adopts the perspective of Activity Theory and considers the whole process of using the canvas as an activity. Moreover, it uses Inner Space and Outer Space to represent the “Internalization — externalization” principle of Activity Theory.

For the Developing Tacit Knowledge, I call it “Objective — Subjective” Knowledge Curation. While Objective Knowing refers to Outer Space, Subjective Knowing refers to Inner Space.

We can apply the same principle to Idea Engagement Canvas. If we see the whole process of Idea Engagement as an Activity, then we can consider Outer Space for “What You See”, Inner Space can be referred to as “What You Think”.

By using the Idea Engagement Canvas, we can visualize the dynamics of the “Idea Engagement” thematic space.

There are many ways of mapping the “Idea Engagement” thematic space. I am going to give three abstract examples.

Juxtaposition

Traditional narratology is about the linear temporal narrative because a story or a text is easy to understand if its structure is organized in a temporal sequence. However, some modern writers use spatial simultaneity as the primary approach to organize their stories. They often use the technique of “Juxtaposition” to create a spatial sense in their writing.

The technique of “Juxtaposition” is a nonlinear spatial narrative approach. I adopt it for Thematic Space Reflection Report. If you read my thematic space reflection reports, you can find there is no linear temporal narrative structure. All notes are just listed without a predefined logic structure.

Though the Structure of Idea Engagement Canvas has its predefined logic structure, it is still a structure of “Juxtaposition”. All 16 blocks are not organized in a linear way.

A person can use Idea Engagement Canvas in different ways by perceiving its spatial structure and potential connections between different blocks. The canvas doesn’t control the process of sensemaking but offers a space for sensemaking.

The above diagram is an example of Juxtaposition, you just place items on each block.

Then, you can build connections between outer space and inner space.

Trajectory

I use the term “Trajectory” to describe the historical development of an Idea Engagement project. In other words, this way is only useful for Reflection.

If you have rich data about an Idea Engagement project, you can place data on the Idea Engagement Canvas. You probably see a trajectory that is similar to the one in the above diagram.

You start with “What You See”, then move to “What You Think”, then you make something to test your ideas and move back to “What You See”… Eventually, you just switch between “What You See” and “What You Think” until you give up or you make a satisfied outcome.

Transdisciplinary

According to the editors of The Oxford Handbook of Interdisciplinarity (2010), there are two words about inter- or transdisciplinary knowledge production. The ‘interdisciplinarity’ refers to current efforts of knowledge production that cross or bridge disciplinary boundaries and the ‘transdisciplinarity’ refers to the growing effort to make knowledge products more pertinent to non-academic actors. However, in the US, ‘interdisciplinarity’ covers both the integration of knowledge across disciplines, narrow and wide and the intercourse between (inter)disciplines and society. The latter often goes by the name of transdisciplinarity, particularly in Europe. (p.xxx)

I choose ‘transdisciplinary thinking’ to refer to the cognitive activities between academic domains and non-academic domains.

For the Idea Engagement Canvas, the term Transdisciplinary refers to a way to switch between Object (Concrete) and Concept (Abstract).

In the above diagram, we move from concrete objects and activities to abstract concepts and social culture. Then, we move between different concepts. Finally, we detach our minds from abstract concepts and attached them to concrete objects.

How do we move between different concepts?

We could use some techniques to run several cognitive operations.

This is a complicated path, but it may offer you some unusual opportunities and creative insights.