TALE: A Possible Theme called “Spontaneous Concept System”
Everyday Concept, Communication, and Innovation
The above picture represents a Possible Theme called “Spontaneous Concept System”.
- Name: Spontaneous Concept System
- Clue: Everyday Concept, Communication, and Innovation
- Type: knowledge theme
- Contributors: Peiroan
- Related themes: Concept Choices, Intellectual Experience,Product Langue
- Reference: Concept-fit, Concept Dynamics, Theme Network
Yesterday I wrote a short post about “Concept System” on Linkedin.
[TALE] A possible theme called “Concept System”
I highly recommend using Concept System to replace Information Architecture for competing with Design System.
The Concept System is more important than Design System.
The above idea was inspired by Dan Brown’s article about Information Architecture. He uses a term called “Underlying Conceptual Structure” to highlight the value of Information Architecture.
Underlying: The structure may not be visible, but guides how the product looks and feels.
Conceptual: The structure deals with abstract representations of real-world things — the platonic forms, if that’s your bag.
Structure: And by structure we mean the nature of the concepts and how they fit together and relate to each other.
He also uses Harvest — a time-tracking app — as an example of the notion of “Underlying Conceptual Structure”. See the diagram below.
I use “Concept System” or “Concept Network” to refer to a similar meaning.
Three days ago, I published an article about “Concept Choices” and the Concept-fit framework for Platform Innovation. I used “Concept Network” in the article.
A primary task of the Concept-fit framework is to understand the landscape of a Concept Network that captures the cognitive structure of a platform on one side and the landscape of multiple thematic networks of a platform-ba which refers to the platform-based social practice space.
A Concept Network can be understood as a primary theme with several related themes. In other words, a Concept Network is a Theme Network that refers to a network of significant keywords.
There is a difference between my perspective and Dan Brown’s perspective. My terms are about the Activity of making a Concept System while “Underlying Conceptual Structure” is used to describe the significant aspect of a Concept System. Also, Dan Brown’s diagram is a representation of a built Concept System.
Today I will use a possible theme called “Spontaneous Concept System” for further discussion.
Contents
- Spontaneous Concepts v.s. Scientific Concepts
- Spontaneous Concept System
- Creativity v.s. Curativity
- Native Vocabulary v.s. Controlled Vocabulary
- Ambiguity v.s. Precision
- Loose Coupling v.s. Highly Structured
- Subjective Experience v.s. Objective Definition
- Genetic Development v.s. Semantic Consistency
- Second-order Activity v.s. First-order Activity
- The Structure of Spontaneous Concept System
- A Spontaneous Concept System about “DID”
Spontaneous Concepts v.s. Scientific Concepts
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. It inspired me to take the following pictures.
The above item was made by my son Peiroan for his Time Capsule project.
Peiroan was born in 2010 and his brother Peiphen is 3 years older than him. Peiphen would open the container as a sophomore!
In the field of Developmental Psychology and Education, some people pay attention to the “wrong” aspect of Spontaneous Concepts. If we detach it from education and attach it to the field of Creativity, Design, and Innovation, we can pay attention to the “personal subjective experience” aspect of Spontaneous Concepts.
Spontaneous Concept System
Inspired by the term “Design System”, I started using the term “Concept System”.
In the field of design and product development, Design System refers to an established popular design practice. It has a root in early Corporate Visual Identity System (CIS) design. See the NASA example below (source: Nielsen Norman Group).
The rise of digital platforms led to the wave of digital design systems which offer a standard design format for a series of apps that share the same platform. For example, Material Design is Google’s open-source design system.
As mentioned above, Dan Brown’s notion “Underlying Conceptual Structure” clearly points out the significance of the Concept System for product development and platform innovation.
For further usage, I made a distinction between Spontaneous Concept System and Defined Concept System in order to highlight the difference between Platform Users and Platform Owners, or Clients and Consultants. You can use “Designed Concept System” to call Defiend Concept System too.
- Spontaneous Concept System
- Defined Concept System
I roughly list several criteria to compare these two ideas. See the table below. Some criteria are used to discuss other topics.
Let’s unpack these criteria one by one.
Creativity v.s. Curativity
Yesterday I asked ChatGPT about the idea of “Spontaneous Concept System”.
Today I asked it again. It claims that it is a theoretical framework!
Do you like it?
It highlights the perspective of Creativity.
…concepts are generated and organized in a spontaneous and self-directed manner. It suggests that concepts can emerge and develop without explicit external guidance or preconceived structures.
The concept of a spontaneous concept system highlights the idea that knowledge and understanding can arise organically, driven by intrinsic motivation and curiosity.
I personally like it since I associate “Creativity” with “Spontaneous Concept System” too.
I also use the term “Curativity” to refer to “turning pieces into a meaningful whole”. A Defined Concept System requires people to deliberately work on selecting, comparing, organizing, and ordering.
Native Vocabulary v.s. Controlled Vocabulary
The term Controlled Vocabulary is used in the field of Information Architecture and library and information science in general. According to Wikipedia:
Controlled vocabularies provide a way to organize knowledge for subsequent retrieval. They are used in subject indexing schemes, subject headings, thesauri,taxonomies and other knowledge organization systems. Controlled vocabulary schemes mandate the use of predefined, preferred terms that have been preselected by the designers of the schemes, in contrast to natural language vocabularies, which have no such restriction.
In library and information science, controlled vocabulary is a carefully selected list of words and phrases, which are used to tag units of information (document or work) so that they may be more easily retrieved by a search. Controlled vocabularies solve the problems of homographs, synonyms and polysemes by a bijection between concepts and preferred terms. In short, controlled vocabularies reduce ambiguity inherent in normal human languages where the same concept can be given different names and ensure consistency.
On Oct 5, 2022, I used the term Controlled Vocabulary for discussing the relationship between “Themes of Practice” and “Culture”. See the diagram below:
I consider “Themes of Practice” as a process type of concept, not a substance type of concept. Thus, it is not a new category of themes, but a transformational process between individual life themes and collective culture themes. It refers to both concept and action. It connects mind and practice. It indicates the transformation of both person and society.
You can find more details in Themes of Practice (2019–2021).
The uniqueness of Themes of Practice is connecting “practice” and “theme”.
I realized that there is a difference between “Themes of Practice” and “Culture”.
Language is part of Culture, but not “Themes of Practice”.
Both “Themes of Practice” and “Culture” share “Controlled Vocabulary” and “Native Vocabulary”, but “Langue (language)” only belongs to “Culture”.
Langue and parole is a theoretical linguistic dichotomy distinguished by Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics.
Langue refers to the abstract system of language while parole means concrete speech.
I also developed a typology of Vocabulary to discuss the complexity of these entities.
- There are some themes behind “Action”, but “Action” does directly refer to Vocabulary. Once you use Vocabulary, you start “Discourse”.
- Parole (speech) and Discourse can be understood as the same thing. Both refer to Native Vocabulary and Controlled Vocabulary.
- Langue (language) only refers to Curated Vocabulary.
This is the newest version of the “Themes of Practice” approach. It offers a solution to explain the relationship between Culture, Themes of Practice, and Language. You can find an example in #TalkThree 16: Concepts, Themes, and Culture.
In this manner, Spontaneous Concept System refers to Native Vocabulary while Defined Concept System refers to Controlled Vocabulary.
Ambiguity v.s. Precision
Inspired by Activity, I consider the process of thought to be an activity that aims to transform ambiguous ideas into precise ideas. This notion is inspired by the principle of Object-orientedness, which means any activity has its motive and goals which point to a final outcome.
Activity Theory doesn’t directly use terms such as Ambiguity and Precision to talk about thought. The “Ambiguity — Precision” Dynamics is based on my assumption that an intended activity of thinking about something tends to produce a definite conclusion.
I think this assumption is useful for discussing the journey of knowledge engagement. In 2021, I also used the “Ambiguity — Precision” Dynamics to discuss the “Diagram — Thought” relation.
We can consider Spontaneous Concept System on the “Ambiguity” side while Defined Concept System is located on the “Precision” side.
Loose Coupling v.s. Highly Structured
In Jan 2023, I also use the “Ambiguity — Precision” Dynamics to discuss the Possible Configurations of a theme network.
A Theme Network is a dynamic complex. We can perceive many possible configurations from a theme network.
If we perceive a configuration and believe it is very useful for the present situation, then we can turn this configuration into a situational framework.
If the situational framework is not only useful for the present situation but also suitable for other situations, then we can turn the framework into solid knowledge for a community of practice.
I also offered a simple model of possible configurations. See the diagram below.
We can see the above diagram as a spectrum. The Spontaneous Concept System is on the “Loose Coupling” side while the Defined Concept System is on the “Highly Structured” side.
Subjective Experience v.s. Objective Definition
As mentioned above, the “Personal Subjective Experience” aspect of Spontaneous Concept System really attracts me because it is very useful for Developing Tacit Knowledge and User Experience Research.
Last year I worked on the Knowledge Discovery project and developed a canvas for Developing Tacit Knowledge. From the perspective of Activity Theory, I consider Developing Tacit Knowledge as an Activity.
Where is the Developing Tacit Knowledge activity? The diagram below highlights a light blue area around the boundary between the inner space and the outer space. That means the activity is a cross-boundary activity.
From the perspective of Curativity Theory, Developing Tacit Knowledge means Objective — Subjective knowledge curation. The inner space is all about personal knowing activities while the outer space is related to social interactions.
The Knowledge Discovery Canvas is designed with four areas: the THEORY area, the PRACTICE area, the END area, and the MEANS area. The “Concepts — Notions” mapping is located in the THEORY area.
Originally, I only considered Theoretical Concepts for the Knowledge Discovery Canvas. Inspired by the MEANS — END spectrum for Frameworks, I developed the following “Theory — Practice spectrum” for Concepts. The outcome is a new typology of Concepts.
You can find more details in Knowledge Discovery: The “Concepts — Notions” Mapping.
The “Concepts — Notions” distinction echoes the two types of Concept Systems.
- Spontaneous Concept System: the “Concepts” block
- Defined Concept System: the “Notion” block
The “Concepts” block refers to objective knowledge concepts. If a person learns a brand new Defined Concept System about a web3 platform, he could place it in the “Concepts” block.
The “Notion” block refers to subjective experiences about some things. We could place Spontaneous Concept System in the “Notion” block. For example, the person could directly use the web3 platform and build a Spontaneous Concept System in his mind by reflecting on his actions, experiences, and knowledge.
Andy Blunden points out an essential fact about spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts.
One of the most difficult questions in the study of concepts is that of the relation of a concept to its definition, and it is this relation which marks perhaps the clearest distinction between spontaneous concepts and scientific concepts. In the case of everyday concepts, the definition lies only at the end of a protracted process of development. In the case of scientific concepts, development begins with learning the verbal definiton.(2012, p.254)
The Spontaneous Concept System is based on a person’s subjective experience with a thing while the Defined Concept System is based on the verbal definition of the thing.
Genetic Development v.s. Semantic Consistency
I use both “Concept” and “Theme” for the Thematic Engagement project and the Strategic Thematic Exploration framework.
I consider “From Theme to Framework” as a significant early phase for the journey of knowledge engagement. There are six states in the phase.
- #1 — A Possible Theme without a Clue
- #2 — A Possible Theme with a Clue
- #3 — A Primary Theme without related themes
- #4 — A Primary Theme with its network
- #5 — A Knowledge Concept with a working definition
- #6 — A Knowledge Framework with a set of concepts
There is a “Theme — Concept” Transformation between #4 and #5. The difference between Theme and Concept looks like the following metaphor:
- Theme > Heart
- Concept > Brain
The Thematic Engagement project aims to explore the “Person — Theme” relationship and interaction. The Thematic Engagement approach is supported by the “Themes of Practice’” approach and the “Project Engagement” approach.
We don’t only consider the semantic relationship between themes, but also the genetic relationship between them. While the semantic relationship is associated with the part of “themes”, the genetic relationship is associated with the part of “practice” which means the real historical development of projects.
A Spontaneous Concept System can be seen as a Theme Network since both emphasize the personal subjective experience and the genetic historical development of the system/network.
In contrast, a Defined Concept System looks like a formal concept network that emphasizes semantic consistency.
Second-order Activity v.s. First-order Activity
The Anticipatory Activity System (AAS) framework is inspired by Activity Theory and Anticipatory System theory. It aims to offer an abstract model for understanding “Self, Other, Present, Future”.
While the traditional Activity Theory focuses on “Exploitative Activity”, the AAS framework is more about “Exploratory Activity”. I introduced the AAS framework in my 2022 book (draft) Advanced Life Strategy: Anticipatory Activity System and Life Achievements.
For the life strategy project, Second-order Activity means Life Discovery Activities. First-order Activity means Life Performance Activities.
Life Discovery Activities aim to discover something new, try something for the future, detect possible themes, and Explore Disciplines. In the early phase of Life Discovery, we can try several Possible Disciplines. In the late phase of Life Discovery, we can focus on one Emerging Discipline.
On the other hand, Life Performance Activities echo Established Disciplines. We can focus on running low-risk projects and produce outcomes that are easily perceived by others.
You can find more details in A Possible Theme called “Possible Discipline”.
A Spontaneous Concept System is useful for the Second-order Activity since it is about exploration and discovery.
A Defined Concept System can be used in a First-order Activity because it emphasizes exploitation and performance.
The Structure of Spontaneous Concept System
Yesterday I shared a thematic conversation about “Intellectual Experience”.
Last week, I had a chat with a friend of mine. The primary theme of our conversation is “Intellectual Experience”. It refers to the following question:
How can we turn “Intellectual Experience” into Developmental Resouces for Advanced Life Strategy?
I used the method of “Mapping Thematic Conversation” to make several diagrams about our thematic maps. The diagram below is about Grace’s Focus and Landscape.
- Initial Theme/Primary Theme: Initial Theme refers to a meaningful keyword that triggers a conversation while Primary Theme refers to a primary theme of a conversation.
- Focus: A person’s Situational Theme Network
- Landscape: A person’s Relevant Theme Network
“Focus” is about situational conversations. For example, a conversation around a post on Linkedin, a discussion around a Twitter thread, an email conversation, etc.
Once a person particulate in a situational conversation, a set of themes from his/her life/work themes would be activated. These themes become a person’s Focus. We can detective a person’s Focus (Situational Theme Network) from comments, messages, etc.
However, it is not easy to see “Landscape” which refers to a person’s Relevant Theme Network. A person can’t say many themes in a situational conversation, but he/she always thinks about more themes than what he/she could say. Landscape (Relevant Theme Network) refers to a set of themes that have a direct connection with the Situational Theme Network.
In other words, we see a person’s thematic thinking and speech as a whole which has two parts:
- Focus (Situational Theme Network): speech in the situation.
- Landscape (Relevant Theme Network): thinking in the mind.
The above diagram was originally developed for the ARCH model. Now we can use the following elements for exploring the structure of Spontaneous Concept System.
- Primary Object
- Situational Theme Network
- Relevant Theme Network
- Deep Theme Network
The above diagram uses a 1+3 schema to represent the structure of Spontaneous Concept System.
- 1: one primary object
- 3: three types of theme network
We can use four words to summarize this new framework:
- Object: the thing we care about in a particular situation
- Focus: Situational Theme Network
- Landscape: Relevant Theme Network
- Backstage: Deep Theme Network
We have learned Object, Focus, and Landscape from the above discussion.
What’s Backstage (Deep Theme Network)?
The ARCH framework is originally developed for thematic conversation. So, Object, Focus, and Landscape are all about a particular situation. Now we add the new lever called Backstage to refer to non-situational significant themes which are related to our historical developmental mind.
The term “Backstage” is inspired by Gilles Fauconnier. In his 1994 book Mental Spaces: Aspects of meaning, construction in natural language, Gilles uses “Backstage Cognition” to name the Preface.
This fundamental property of language is counterintuitive: In our folk theory, it is the words that carry the meaning: we “say what we mean,” we “put meaning into words,” and so on. The difference between the folk-theoretic conception and the actual (backstage) reality goes unnoticed for very interesting reasons.
Not only are we not aware of the constructions we perform (anymore, say, than we are aware of chemical reactions in our brain or other biological operations), but we do not suspect the extent to which vast amounts of prestructured knowledge, selected implicitly by context, are necessary to form any interpretation of anything.
We notice only the tip of the iceberg — the words — and we attribute all the rest to common sense. This fiction is wonderfully convenient in everyday life, where we need to notice only what is different, not what is shared, but we must resist the temptation to import it into scientific theory. (p.xix)
I use Backstage as a metaphor to describe the thing behind the Frontstage: the Situation.
The next section will use the model to represent a real example of Spontaneous Concept System.
A Spontaneous Concept System about “DID”
In TALE: A Possible Theme called “Concept Choices”, I mentioned two projects I am recently working on:
- A Strategic Design Research project about a web3 platform.
- A Creative Life Study project about Ping-keung Lui’s theoretical sociology.
I have used Lui’s theoretical sociology as an example for the theme of “Concept Choices”. Now I am going to use the web3 platform as an example of “Spontaneous Concept System”.
The web3 platform recently launched a new product that aims to enable non-technical users to create, launch, and host their own decentralized applications (DApps). We may use the “No-code DApps platform” to frame the new product.
I have 0 knowledge of web3 and DApps. The first step of the Strategic Design Research project is to directly use the platform to create a simple DApp without formal training. I also didn’t read their HELP documents and DEVELOPER documentation.
I just learned some new knowledge about web3 and DID (Decentralized Identify) by using their platform to create a simple website with several pages. Sometimes I searched some keywords on the web in order to know some new terms. Sometimes I just use the Try-and-Fail approach to figure out the real meanings of some new terms.
After successfully launching the simple website, I made the screenshot below.
At that moment, I realized that there is a gap between the platform owner’s Concept System and my Concept System. As the designer of the platform, the owner clearly understands the following terms and the complicated relationships between these terms:
- DID Wallet
- DID
- Profile
- Passport
However, I have to figure out the following questions:
- What is the difference between DID Wallet and DID?
- I can see the Wallet on an app on my mobile phone. But, where is my DID?
- What does Switch DID mean? Do I have more than one DID?
- What’s the difference between Passport and DID?
By reading some documents, I can understand their design decision about separating Social Profiles and User Accounts.
The platform used a multi-layer approach to design its DID system. It’s fine to directly push this complicated structure to Developers because Developers can read documents.
Now we can use “Spontaneous Concept System” to describe my concept system. See the diagram below.
As mentioned above, my Focus (Situational Theme Network) is on the new terms I have to learn.
- DID Wallet
- Passport
- Social Profile
I list three themes in the box of Landscape (Relevant Theme Network):
- Personas Dynamics: A theme about Self, Role, and Identity. you can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Possible Personas”.
- Social (Software) Design: I have been fascinated by social software design for many years.
- Decentralized Knowledge Badges (DKBs): a new idea about applying NFT technology to Knowledge Badges.
My Relevant Theme Network indicates some potential opportunities for using the platform to explore my interests. In the other way, I use these interests to help me understand the meaning of Defined Concept System.
Moreover, we can dive into my Backstage (Deep Theme Network). Why do I consider “Microspace” and “Knowledge Engagement”?
Many years ago, I used “microspace” as my online ID and URL address for my first blog. The term “microspace” refers to my vision of “Mass Customization of Self”. Inspired by B. Joseph Pine II’s 1993 book Mass Customization: the new frontier in business competition, I used “microspace” to describe an online space where people can offer opportunities to others. A person can have more than one “microspace”. A blog is a simple format of a “microspace”.
In fact, I didn’t use “microspace” to describe a particular technology such as blog. I wanted to use it to describe a new possibility of social reality.
The theme of “Knowledge Engagement” was born recently. I started using it last year. Why do I add it to my “Spontaneous Concept System” about DID? Because I use the following model to understand the path of growing a knowledge enterprise.
Each Knowledge Enterprise is defined by a unique theme and it should be developed by its founders with a unique perspective.
While Phase 1 is about an individual mind, Phase 2 is about a collective project.
A knowledge center is a collective project that aims to develop a certain unique knowledge. A “center” should have its own uniqueness in order to establish its identity and theme. Otherwise, there is no need to build a “center”.
Phase 3 is building a Knowledge Community. The difference between Knowledge Center and Knowledge Community is Scope and Scale. A knowledge center may only have less than 15 members while a knowledge community may have thousands of members.
You can find more details in CALL: How to Grow A Knowledge Enterprise and TALE: A Possible Theme called “Knowledge Center”.
If we connect the theme of “Knowledge Center” with web3 technology and DID, then we can imagine a new vision of Decentralized Knowledge Innovation.
How can we use Decentralized Technology to enable Knowledge Innovation?
This is my Spontaneous Concept System about “DID” in May 2023.
