TALE: A Possible Theme called “Social Pieces”

Oliver Ding

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Published in

TALE500

11 min readApr 20, 2023

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An example of the “Early Responses” Technique to Strategic Thematic Exploration

The above picture represents a Possible Theme called “Social Pieces”.

Name: Social Pieces
Clue: …
Meta-Clue: The “Early Responses” Technique to Creative Exploration
Type: knowledge theme
Contributors: Mani I, Robert Kozma
Reference: Curativity Theory, Strategic Thematic Exploration

The theme of “Social Pieces” was inspired by a post about Robert Kozma’s new book Make The World a Better Place: Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values. On April 19, 2023, Mani I published the post on Linkedin and mentioned me in a comment.

I just did the *new package dance* when I received Robert Kozma Ph.D.s brand new book Make The World A Better Place — Design with Passion, Purpose, and Values.
I’m humbled that he reached out to me the other day to send me an advanced copy, and on first impressions, it looks fantastic!
It comprehensively covers topics as broad as Systemic Design, designing for sustainability and social innovation.

The picture below is the screenshot of Mani I’s comment and my reply.

This post aims to create an example of the “Early Responses” Technique to Creative Exploration. This is the reason that I didn’t write anything for the section on “Clue”.

How to read this post?

Focus on Part 1 if you want to know more about my random ideas about the possible theme “Social Pieces”.
Jump to Part 2 if you want directly know the “Early Responses” Technique.

PART 1: Random Ideas about “Social Pieces”

A possible theme refers to a cognitive space around a particular theme. Unlike Concepts, themes don’t require formal structure. For example, I can use the possible theme “Social Pieces” without making a formal definition for it. I just need to put random ideas which may be related to it into the cognitive space.

1. Why did I use “Social Pieces” and “A Meaningful Whole” in my comment?

In 2019, I wrote a book (draft) titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice.

I have been working in the curation field for over ten years. I was the Chief Information Architect of BagTheWeb which was an early tool for content curation (We launched the site in 2010). This experience inspired me to make a long-term commitment to the Curation theme. After having 10 years of various curation-related practical work experience and theory learning, I coined a term called Curativity and developed Curativity Theory which became a book.

The new term Curativity refers to “curating pieces into a meaningful whole” which means general curatorial practice. The reason why I coined the term is that I was not satisfied with the specific view of curation such as “professional curation means art and museum.” I argued that there is a need to redefine “curatorial practice” as a general social activity and a universal experience. In other words, I was calling for an interdisciplinary view of curation or curatorial practice.

In order to avoid unnecessary debate on the concept of curation or curatorial practice, I coined the term Curativity to refer to my argument. Thus, Curativity is an ontological-level invention. It points to a new space for knowing and understanding.

The diagram below shows the basic elements of Curativity: Pieces — Container — Whole. The basic assumption behind the diagram and the new term is: “In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need containers to contain pieces and shape them.”

Pieces, Container, and Whole together form a triad which is the basic unit of analysis of Curativity Theory. Also, this unit of analysis establishes a new theoretical category at the ontological level. The concept of Curativity indicates three statuses of things:

Things-in-Pieces
Things-in-Container
Things-in-Whole

Thus, Curativity Theory is all about understanding the structure and dynamics of these three statuses.

You can find more details in the following links:

2. People as Social Pieces

I didn’t apply Curativity Theory to discuss social life because I thought Organizational Theories are good enough for such tasks. If we consider People as Social Pieces, and Organizations as Containers, then Curativity Theory is a new theory of Organizational Theories. However, why do we need this new idea since we have many theories of organizations?

In the past years, I worked on two projects about Curativity Theory:

The Knowledge Curation project
The Life Curation project

From these two projects, I learned more insights of using Curativity Theory in the context of social life. It’s time to reflect on my original assumption.

Maybe I can think about applying Curativity Theory to discuss general social structure. My idea is to return to the following diagram.

The above diagram is called “The Landscape of Ecological Practice Approach”.

Based on the concept of Container, I coined two related ideas: Network and Platform. The Network refers to the pre-container status which means pieces loose coupling outside the container. The Platform refers to the post-container status which means pieces loose coupling within the super large container. These three ideas form a triad: Network — Container — Platform. I consider the triad as the basic form of collective contexts.

The above diagram represents a large map of the ecological practice approach. Here we see three basic types of collective context and attaching/detaching acts inside contexts and between contexts.

The Ecological Practice Approach is a meta-theory. It is not a social theory.

If we consider People as Social Pieces, then the model can generate a new social theory called “Social Curativity Theory”.

3. Detach, Attach, and Social Moves

The Ecological Practice approach is a radical account with its transactional worldview. The approach is inspired by ideas from multiple disciplines. Thus, it is an interdisciplinary study itself. However, the Ecological Practice approach has its own focus: ecological complexity, which means the relationship between “the structure and dynamic of environments” and “human action and social practice”.

Both traditional Pragmatism and contemporary embodied cognitive science are broad-based movements with various theoretical approaches. Curativity theory doesn’t want to build a new approach to mind and cognition, its primary interest is the action and practice of turning pieces into a meaningful whole. As a by-product of writing Curativity, the Ecological Practice approach is inspired by ideas from multiple disciplines.

A unique aspect of Curativity Theory is the dialectical hierarchy and dialectical boundary in general. The hierarchy can be considered as a specific type of piece — whole relationship. In order to curate two separate existing layers together into a meaningful whole, we can create a new intermediate layer.

Curativity is about turning pieces into a whole. If we consider individual action experience as pieces (the level of ecological psychology) and the totality of collective conceptual themes as a whole (the level of cognitive linguistics), we can use Curativity to understand the mechanism of turning individual action experience (pieces) into collective conceptual themes (whole).

“Social Curativity Theory” can pay attention to the relationship between “the structure and dynamic of environments” and “human action and social practice” too.

Moreover, it can focus on Social Moves which means Detaching from Social Environments and Attaching to Social Environments.

The above diagram is the basic mode of the Ecological Practice approach. Now we can move to Social Container which refers to Social Environments.

4. Social Offers as Opportunities

We can also use Social Offers to refer to Social Opportunities.

5. Curativity + Emergence

The Ecological Practice approach considers the “Form of Action” as “Attach” or “Detach”. Any action is either an attaching act or a detaching act.

The two forms of acts are represented by binary numbers. The 0 represents detaching act and the 1 represents attaching act. The parenthesis represents the Container. The right diagram shows an example of complex status which brings out other two concepts: Curativity and Themes of Practice.

I also add the concept of Emergence from complexity theory to the above diagram.

What’s the difference between Emergence and Curativity?

In general, emergence theories claim that the meaning of a whole is derivated from the interactive movement of its parts. There is no human agency in the process of meaning-making.

Curativity Theory claims that human agency can curate a meaningful whole by arranging parts and pieces. The typical way of social curation is to make new social containers and create new types of social containers.

Emergence and Curativity are two mechanisms of social development. They work together. We can’t remove human agency from human history, and we can’t remove natural power from human history too.

PART 2

Why do I use this experience as an example of the “Early Responses” Technique to Strategic Theamtic Exploration?

What does “Early Responses” mean? I learned the term from a journal called Discourse Processes. According to the editors of the journal, early responses refer to “responsive actions that (start to) unfold while the production of the responded-to turn and action is still underway”.

Inspired by the journal, I use “Early Responses” to describe the early stage of Strategic Thematic Exploration. See the diagram below.

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

In each stage, we capture inspired ideas from our everyday life experiences (Lifeflow) and we select some ideas and put them into a Thematic Space. I use “Early Responses” to refer to this type of action.

I consider Linkedin Discussion as a Life Container for my creative life. I use “continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought”.

What James emphasized is the Subjective Life. I follow this metaphor and directly use Life as a continuous flow to describe a person’s subjective experience of his own life. You can’t use a knife to cut a stream, you only can use a container to contain it.

The water doesn’t have a form which also means a structure, but the container has a form. The form of our experience is perceived as an interaction between our immediate actions with ecological situations which refers to physical environments and social environments.

You can find more details about Lifeflow and Life Container in TALE: A Possible theme called “Life Coordinate”.

As mentioned above, there are some offers inside the container. See the diagram below. Let’s apply the model to the Linkedin Discussion.

Container: A Linkedin Discussion about Robert Kozma’s book
Offers: Mani I mentioned me in his comment
Acts: I reply to Mani’s comment
Detach: I detached the word “Social Pieces” from my comment and attached it to a new thematic space.

In fact, we should consider the “Social Pieces” thematic space as a sub-space of the “Curativity” thematic space.

Why did I use it as an example of “Early Responses”?

The most important action of creative exploration and strategic thematic exploration in particular is capturing inspired ideas.

A Possible Theme without Clue is the first movement of capturing inspired ideas for a Strategic Thematic Exploration project.