TALE: A Possible Theme called “Product Engagement”

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TALE500

8 min readFeb 7, 2023

“Product as Thing” and “Business as Engagement”

Last week I had wonderful discussions with friends who work on product development and business in general. These conversations inspired me to connect my theoretical approaches with product and business.

Eventually, I made a new possible theme called “Product Engagement” which is represented by the above diagram.

In the past two weeks, I made many new possible themes. Today I’d like to name this process “Thematic Imagination”.

Why do I call it “Imagination”? Because they are “Possible Themes” because they are just names of some ideas without real practices. So, we can’t call them “Life Themes” or “Cultural Themes”.

Also, the term “Thematic” highlights a significant aspect of Developing Possible Themes, I often relied on words as the source of imagination. However, I am not playing the linguistic game. I use meaningful keywords (themes) as representations of my thoughts.

In this way, I can also use diagrams to visualize my thinking process behind Thematic Imagination.

Today I will use “Product Engagement” to discuss some techniques for Thematic Imagination.

The “X as Y” Technique
The “Theory—Practice” Connection
The “Double Theme” Technique

These techniques are heuristic tools. They are simple and powerful. You can use these techniques to develop your possible themes.

The “X as Y” Technique

The “X as Y” technique is a simple heuristic tool for theoretical development. It is also a key for learning theories. Basically, we can understand “X as Y” as “Nail” and “Hammer”.

X: Nail
Y: Hammer
X as Y: Using Y (a hammer) to understand X (a nail)

X refers to a thing we want to understand while Y refers to a tool for our understanding. For learning theories and making theories, Y tends to be a perspective.

How did I make the new idea of “Product as Thing”?

X = “Product”=Product Development
Y = “Thing”= The “Ecological Practice” Approach
X as Y = “Product as Thing” = Using The Ecological Practice Approach to understand Product Development

Names should be short. So I use meaningful keywords as signs to refer to the original words. “Product” and “Thing” are short meaningful keywords.

I often use the “X as Y” technique to develop ideas and wrote articles. See examples below:

You can find more details in #TalkThree 07: How to Understand “X as Y”.

The “Theory — Practice” Connection

From Sept 2018 to March 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice. The book presents the Curativity Theory with a theoretical foundation Ecological Practice approach. In 2020, I decided to apply Curativity Theory to Knowledge Building and I started working on the Knowledge Curation project which led to several books later.

The mission behind the Knowledge Curation project is Connecting Theory and Practice.

In the past three years, I developed a series of frameworks, models, diagrams, canvases, and methods for the Knowledge Curation Project.

I used the following HERO U diagram to connect THEORY and PRACTICE.

The HERO U diagram defines six types of objects of knowing:

mTheory: Meta-theory
sTheory: Specific Theory
aModel: Abstract Model
cModel: Concrete Model
dPractice: Domain Practice
gPractice: General Practice

You can find more details in The Knowledge Curation Toolkit #1: Theme U for Single-theory Curation.

I didn’t use the HERO U diagram to represent the ideas behind “Product Engagement” because it only uses in the Single Theory Curation activity. If we use two HERO U diagrams for “Product Engagement”, the visual will be very complex.

The above diagram clearly shows two areas: THEORY and PRACTICE.

The “Ecological Practice” approach is inspired by Ecological Psychology
The “Project Engagement” approach is inspired by Activity Theory

The theme of “Product Engagement” also indicates a new creative space for connecting THEORY and PRACTICE.

The “Double Theme” Technique

The “Double Theme” technique is a very useful heuristic tool for developing possible themes, especially knowledge themes.

If we put two meaningful keywords together, we get a “Double Theme”.

However, there are three thematic spaces behind a new Double Theme. You have to move some things from two old thematic spaces into the new thematic space. See the diagram below:

There are three thematic spaces:

“Product as Thing”
“Business as Engagement”
“Product Engagement”

There is a simple structure behind this idea: A+B=AB.

If you want to create some unique knowledge themes, you can pay attention to their structure. For example, Opposite Themes lead to Structural Tensions such as boundary, distance, difference, heterogeneity, contradiction, and complementation. If we can turn one or more structural tensions into creative opportunities, then we could find a way to knowledge innovation.

Moreover, you can build a structure with nested double themes. One year ago, I used the following structure to write a series of articles:

[(A1+A2)+B] =C

Let’s use Life Discovery: The “Result — Reward” Gap and Achievement as an example to understand this structure:

A1 = Result
A2 = Reward
(A1+A2) = The “Result — Reward” Gap
B = Achievement
C = The Relevance of Achievement

The article has the following 11 sections:

1. The Anticipatory Activity System Framework
2. The Result — Reward Gap
3. Result as First-order Outcome
4. Reward as Second-order Outcome
5. The “Self — Other” Relevance
6. Self-Reward: Enjoyment, Affirmation, and Reflection
7. Interpersonal Reward: Perception, Conception, and Curation
8. Transactional Reward: Emotional Support
9. Collective Reward: Public Recognition
10. The Time Distance between Result and Reward
11. The Relevance of Achievement

I started defining A1 and A2 and moved to (A1+A2), then connected it with B. In order to understand the whole of [(A1+A2)+B], I adopted the “Self — Other” Relevance as a thinking tool, the final outcome is a new typology of Achievement.

You can find more details in Knowledge Discovery: The “Double Theme” Strategy.

Product as Thing

The notion of “Product as Thing” is inspired by the “Ecological Practice” approach and related theoretical resources.

Inspired by Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and other theoretical resources, I developed a new theoretical approach called “Ecological Practice”.

The approach is formed with the following concepts:

Affordance
Attachance
Supportance
Curativity
Thematic Space
… some other concepts

The notion of “Product as Thing” encourages us to think about Products from multiple perspectives. It suggests eights types of actions that define the “People — Product” engagement:

Found
Use
Make
Share
Sell
Buy
Host
Join

You can find more details in Ecological Practice Design (Book). You can also find some ideas about “Affordance”, “Attachance”, and “Curativity” in Lifesystem: Theory-based Reflection.

You can also find a canvas called Value Engagement (Oliver Ding, 2020).

The above canvas highlights some key ideas from two articles: The Dialectical Room and Value Engagement and The Interactive Zone and Value Engagement.

Business as Engagement

The notion of “Business as Engagement” is inspired by the “Product Engagement” approach and related theoretical resources.

Business is a significant part of individual life and social life. We can use the Project Engagement approach to understand Business.

The Project Engagement Toolkit is based on Oliver Ding’s 2021 book Project-oriented Activity Theory (draft).

The Project Engagement Toolkit is a project-oriented toolkit for theory-based reflection and study. A significant aspect of the toolkit is it connects the following two theoretical approaches of Activity Theory together and offers a series tools for practitioners in the age of projectification.

The Activity System Model (Yrjö Engeström, 1987)
Activity as Formation of Concept (Andy Blunden, 2010, 2012, 2014)

While Engeström’s model is perfect for dealing with traditional work projects, Blunden’s approach considers collaborative projects as the foundation of social movements and cultural innovation.

By curating the above two approaches together, the toolkit offers a cross-boundary solution for achieving a balance between individual impact and collective impact. In this way, the toolkit could lead us to an innovative way of connecting personal life themes and cultural themes in order to build a sustainable society together.

You can find more details in The Project Engagement Toolkit (v1.0).

In 2022, I also developed several new modules for the Project Engagement approach. You can find more details in Project Engagement (v2): Life, History, and Multiverse and Project Engagement (v2.1) as an Innovation Approach.

Zone
Project
Project Network
Platform
Life-History
Multiverse

The Project Engagement approach (v2.1) has several units of analysis. See the above diagram. It can support multiple-level analysis of Business as Engagement.