TALE: A Possible Theme called “Possible Practice”
From Creative Action to Possible Practice
The above picture represents a Possible Theme called “How AI Curate”.
- Name: Possible Practice
- Clue: Creative Actions and Beyond
- Type: cultural theme
- Contributor: Jonathan Castillo Alfonso
- Reference: Curativity Theory, How Artifacts Afford, Critical Sociology
The theme of “Possible Practice” was inspired by Jonathan Castillo Alfonso who comments on my 2020 article The NICE Way and Creative Actions on Linkedin.
In fact, I used the term “Possible Practice” as the mission of the Ecological Practice approach.
Since 2001, a group of philosophers, sociologists, and scientists have rediscovered the practice perspective and used it as a lens to explore and examine the role of practices in human activity. Researchers called it The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. As Schatzki pointed out, “There is no unified practice approach”(2001, p.2). Davide Nicolini adopted a way of a toolkit to introduce the following six different ways of theorizing practice in his 2013 book Practice Theory, Work, & Organization:
- Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu
- Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
- Activity Theory / Cultural-historical activity theory (the Marxian/Vygotskian/Leont’evian tradition)
- Ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, 1954)
- The Site of Social (contemporary developments of the Heideggerian/Wittgensteinian traditions, by Theodore R. Schatzki)
- Conversation Analysis / Critical Discourse Analysis (the Foucauldian tradition)
Nicolini also pointed out, “Practice theories are fundamentally ontological projects in the sense that they attempt to provide a new vocabulary to describe the world and to populate the world with specific ‘units of analysis’; that is, practice. How these units are defined, however, is internal to each of the theories, and choosing one of them would thus amount to reducing the richness provided by the different approaches.” (2012, p.9)
I suggest “Possible Practice” as a new term that expands the scope of contemporary practice theories from “actual actions and existing practice” to “possible actions and possible practice”. I consider “Possible Practice” as the special unit of analysis for my approach “Ecological Practice”. Again, the Ecological Practice Approach is not an alternative to contemporary practice theories, but expands their scope and contains more theoretical concepts such as James J. Gibson’s Affordance.
The ecological practice approach claims that the original source of all human actions is affordance and imagination. Affordance refers to material engagement while imagination refers to linguistic engagement. If we accept the ideas from cognitive linguistics which claims that the source of linguistic conceptual metaphor is embodied experience, we can reduce the linguistic engagement (imagination) to material engagement (affordance). In fact, we can learn more from philosophists of embodied cognitive science. They consider affordance as an essential concept for rethinking the mind from the perspective of embodied cognitive science.
My focus is action and practice, not mind and cognition. The goal of the ecological approach is to build a new unit of analysis for discussing action and practice. The “Possible Practice” is just the beginning.
In 2020, I also made a framework for “Possible Practice”. See the above diagram.
I consider actions at the individual level and practice at the collective level. The four types of actions correspond to four types of social practice.
- Possible Practice — Possible Actions
- Normal Practice — Normal Actions
- Novel Practice — Creative actions
- Ideal Practice — Exemplary Actions
Why do I place Possible Practice at the center of the new framework? I consider the possible practice as the origin of all types of practice. If we trace back to the historical development of any social practice. We can always find that their sources are possible actions. In order to build the concept of Possible Practice, I use Possible Actions to replace Imagined Actions. I consider affordance and imagination are two sources of possible actions.
The framework is based on the NICE Way which was introduced in The NICE Way and Creative Actions.
In order to explain Action-based Creativity, I developed the above framework to connect individual daily experience at the micro level and collective culture at the macro level.
I call it the N.I.C.E. framework. N stands for normal actions, I stands for Imagined actions, C stands for creative actions, and E stands for exemplary actions.
I also identified four types of transformation processes within Action-based creativity.
- Variate: from normal actions to creative actions
- Inspire: from normal actions to imagined actions
- Actualize: from imagined actions to creative actions
- Curate: from creative actions to exemplary actions
The N.I.C.E. way adopts many theoretical concepts from the tradition of creativity research. You can find more details in The NICE Way and Possible Practice.
Jonathan Castillo Alfonso’s comment
Thanks for the tag, Oliver Ding! 🤝 Well, I’m sure my comments about it will be far from going completely to the core of your ideas and not encompassing all of your work either. I will only try to approach and contribute some reflections that genuinely came to me. For now, I have only reviewed “The NICE Way and Creative Actions” and “The Development of Ecological Practice Approach”.
📌 First, I would like to express my affinity with your style of work, since I believe it represents the continuous modification that characterizes scientific reasoning: no proposition is a finished proposition, nor does it consist of some complete and absolute “truth”.
📌 I also consider it very fruitful and profitable to focus the perspective towards interdisciplinary work. From my point of view, this is much closer to a “Behavioral Sciences” project than in other contexts. If I have understood correctly, using a knowledge curation tool, I think it is feasible to project different disciplines on a human problem in a coherent way (in your proposal, sociology and psychology), or more precisely, different disciplinary theories, taking care of some logical or philosophical incompatibilities higher level (metatheories).
📌 I really loved the “The NICE Way” entry. For now, I will only refer to the definition and characterization of creativity. I must say that I have only had contact with this area accidentally. But I think that the apparent non-mediational approach (also present in Gibson) that is in your ideas could be compatible with the interbehavioral position. A few years ago I met a well-known Mexican professor who has carried out studies on creative behavior and offers this characterization: “Creativity:
1️⃣ Is a term that designates the tendency of behavior to generate new problems, thus conceived it can be recovered as a category worthy of being studied […]
2️⃣ It implies varied and novel behavior, which is not the result or evidence of any internal or “mental” operation, and which can only be observed as a set or collection of events in which the individual’s behavior restructures a situation and generates with its make new problems and new ways to solve them […]
📌 [I think that both 1. and 2. correspond very much to the non-mediational approach. Creativity is not a process prior to action but a property of it: a tendency or propensity -a possible practice that can be actualized? an actualization of affordances?-]
3️⃣ Creative behavior emerges from intelligent behavior (tendency to solve problems in a particular area in an effective and varied way) and can only be assigned to specific areas of performance […] (Carpio, et al., 2007).
🔸This professor and his colleagues are dedicated to studying creative behavior experimentally based on these assumptions. What do you think? Here I leave the text in case you are interested:http://www.scielo.org.co/pdf/acp/v10n2/v10n2a05.pdf (unfortunately it is in Spanish, but let me know if you have problems with the translation and I will help you).
📌 I think that from this psychological point of view, by including the social component (assessment, regulation, field), models like “The Systems” are useful and that is another discussion.
Finally three peripheral and intriguing questions:
📌 Reading your text, I remembered a phrase from the famous food critic and curator from the movie Ratatouille: “Not everyone can become a great artist, but a great artist can come from anywhere”. Perhaps we can’t all be creative, but creative behavior could emerge in any practice?
📌 Why counseling psychology in your scheme? Is it because of your interest in the biographical history of creativity? If abstraction is wanted in the understanding of creativity, wouldn’t a nomothetic objective be preferable and not an ideographic one?
📌 If a machine met the proposed criteria to identify creativity (e.g. creating new non-preset criteria), we could consider it as creative behavior (e.g. an AI image?).
From Creative Actions to Creative Life
Last week I edited a possible book titled Knowledge Engagement: Knowledge Center and Creative Life Theory.
This possible book collects 15 notes. Total 228 pages.
In the past several months, I read Ping-keung Lui’s book Gaze, Actions, and the Social World which is a book about a brand new theoretical sociology. I wrote notes and reflected on my projects.
Last year, I adopt Lui’s theoretical sociology to curate several theoretical frameworks into a new approach called “Creative Life”. While reading and writing these notes, I also develop v2 of “Creative Life”.
The diagram below represents the context of “Creative Life Theory”.
My focus is located on a potential space connecting sociology and psychology, however, I didn’t work on Sociological Theories and Counseling Psychology.
In the past years, I worked on projects about the following four things:
The Psychology of Creativity
In 2020, I worked on developing a new approach to studying Action-based Creativity in the age of platforms.
In 2022, I started the Slow Cognition project and applied Howard E. Gruber’s evolving systems approach to conduct a research project about creative work.
Ecological Psychology
From 2019 to 2022, I worked on developing the Ecologial Practice Approach which is inspired by Ecological Psychology.
Activity Theory
From 2020 to 2022, I worked on the Activity U project and Activity Analysis Center.
Theoretical Sociology
From 2022 to 2023, I worked on a project about Theoretical Sociology.
I started using the term “Creative Action” in 2019. My first knowledge center CALL stands for Creative Action Learning Lab.
In 2022, I used “Creative Action” as a unit of analysis for the Creative Life approach which is presented with four possible books.
In 2022, I developed several units of analysis for understanding Aspects of Creative Life.
- Creative Actions
- Creative Projects
- Creative Journey
- Creative Landscape
- Creative Lifescope
Each Unit of Analysis refers to a unique time scale, spatial scale, and theoretical focus. The “Action” unit of analysis refers to the Creative Action Analysis Method.
You can find more details in A Semiotic System Diagram for Creative Life Curation.
“Behavioral Sciences” or “Creative Life Science”?
I consider the “Creative Life” thematic space as a creative space for connecting Sociology and Psychology.
The reason is that I consider Activity Theory as a significant theoretical resource for my approach, especially Andy Blunden’s “project as a unit of analysis of activity” to Activity Theory.
Andy Blunden claims that a project-oriented approach is both psychology and sociology, “A project is a focus for an individual’s motivation, the indispensable vehicle for the exercise of their will and thus the key determinant of their psychology and the process which produces and reproduces the social fabric. Projects, therefore, give direct expression to the identity of the sciences of the mind and the social sciences. Projects belong to both; a project is a concept of both psychology and sociology.” (2014, p.15)
The concept of Life can be understood as Collective Life and Individual Life. We can use the concept of Project to understand both of them. A person’s real life is a set of real actions. The concept of Project is a way of curating these actions. On the other hand, Collective Life can be curated with Projects too.
While Projection refers to the First-order Experience of joining a project, Significance refers to reflecting on Projection. Why does a person start or join a project? What does the project mean to the person in her life?
The technique for turning Projection into Significance is called Activity Analysis because the Project Engagement approach belongs to Activity Theory. We can use many models of Activity Theory as tools for our analysis. For example, the diagram below is an example of using the basic model of Activity Theory to reflect on a project.
While the basic model of Activity Theory considers “Subject — Mediating Instruments — Object”, the above example also uses a series of operational concepts for Activity Analysis. You can find more details of the example in Mapping Thematic Journey (Engaging with Activity Theory, 2020–2022).
“Behavioral Sciences” or “Creative Life Science”? I think this is not an important question.
I’d like to claim the uniqueness of “Creative Life” approach is its view on “Life” which refers to both individual life and social life.
In other words, there is no boundary between sociology and psychology in the creative space of “Creative Life”.
