TALE: A Possible Theme called “The Project — Portfolio Gap”

Oliver Ding

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TALE500

8 min readFeb 8, 2023

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The Project is inside, the Portfolio is outside

The above picture represents a Possible Theme called “The Project-Portfolio Gap”.

Name: The Project-Portfolio Gap
Clue: The Project is inside, and the Portfolio is outside.
Type: knowledge theme
Contributor: Juan Ramirez
Reference: The Project Engagement approach (Oliver Ding, 2021, 2022),
Related Themes: Business as Engagement, Design as Creative Life, Knowledge Engagement

The theme of “The Project-Portfolio Gap” was inspired by Juan Ramirez’s post about portfolios on Linkedin.

According to Juan Ramirez, “At some point, the design industry will need to evolve beyond portfolios as the sole means of showcasing a designer’s work.”

Portfolios aren’t only an archaic medium, but they also seem highly ineffective at showing the week-by-week evolution of a disciplined designer.
The most significant problem portfolios have is that they matter exponentially less when you’re employed.

Activity Theorists use a term called “Pluse” to describe the dynamic transformation of work.

According to Clay Spinuzzi, “Each transformation is what I’ve been calling a Pulse (Engestrom, Engestrom & Vahaaho 1999). Work activity is dynamic: it pulses like a heart, with each pulse transforming the object. If your heart stopped pulsing, you’d be dead; If an activity stops pulsing, it’s no longer an activity.” (All Edge: Inside the New Workplace Networks, p.101)

A Designer’ creative life is a chain of real-life design projects. If a designer stops working on a design project, his/her creative life is dead.

There is a gap between Projects and Portfolios. The former is about Activity, while the latter is about Curativity.

Activity Theory’s primary theme is work which is about transformation from object to outcome. However, Curativity Theory is about curating pieces of things into a meaningful whole.

How can a creative person turn his/her pieces of work experiences into a meaningful creative life biography?

It requires the creative person to reflect on his/her projects and write or express new insights in other formats continually.

Moreover, he/she also needs to organize these insights into a meaningful whole. Eventually, he/she will find his/her primary creative theme.

The World of Activity

In Nov 2022, I developed a concept called “the World of Activity” and used the following diagram to develop a model. Now we can use this model to discuss “The Project — Portfolio Gap”.

The above diagram highlights four keywords: Birth, Death, Heaven, and Earth.

The Horizontal group refers to the “Activity” of Life while The Vertical group refers to the “Theory” of Life.

The “Activity” of Life = the Situations of Activity of “Engagement”
The “Theory” of Life = the Degrees of Abstraction of “Knowledge”

If we put them together, we get the following formula.

The World of Activity = The “Activity” of Life + The “Theory” of Life = “Activity Theory”

The “Birth — Death” dimension refers to the “alive” status of things. Actions and Activities are only “alive” when we are acting. At the end of an activity, the thing we worked on is produced. It’s done. It’s no longer alive. If we use it in a new activity, it becomes alive again.

The “Heaven — Earth” dimension is a metaphor that is a popular pair of concepts in Chinese philosophy. 天 (Tian) heaven, 地 (Di) earth, and 人 (Ren) humans, are three spheres of origin, 三才 (San Cai). This threefold structure of the universe offers a coherent and systematic approach to understand nature and society.

I’d like to use “天 (Tian) heaven” to refer to the high degree of abstraction of knowledge while “地 (Di) earth” is associated with the low degree of abstraction of knowledge.

The “Langue” refers to universal concepts or vocabulary while “Space” refers to spatial structure and immediate embodied experience.

The “Theory” refers to the high degree of abstraction of knowledge while the “Practice” refers to the low degree of abstraction of knowledge.

The “Episteme — Empeiria” dimension refers to Aristotle’s typology of knowledge.

How can we apply this model to discuss “The Project — Portfolio Gap”?

Projects are located in the “Birth — Death” dimension
Portfolios are located in the “Heaven — Earth” dimension

We can’t use a single dimension to think about our creative life. We need to think about both two dimensions.

Project Engagement v.s. Knowledge Engagement

We can use the Project Engagement approach to understand designers’ design projects.

In the field of business development, there are 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. Moreover, we can use “Second-order Activity” to understand “Strategic Discovery”. You can find more details about “Second-order Activity” in A Typology for Anticipatory Activity System.

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

We can also use the notion of “Knowledge Engagement” to reflect on the practice of Design Portfolios.

You can find more details in Dimensions of Knowledge Engagement.

How does a designer start a journey of knowledge engagement? My suggestion is to select an annual primary theme and run a personal project around the theme deeply.

The annual primary theme can be about the Design Activity, or about other domain practices, or a purely theoretical concept.

A designer can do many creative actions that are not directly related to design!

The Inside—Outside Challenge

A deep issue behind the “The Project — Portfolio Gap” is called the Inside-Outside Boundary.

In the field of business, a design project is contained by a business. The firm sets a boundary for the design project. In this way, we can see a design project as a closed creative space. See the picture below.

What’s Portfolio?

A Portfolio is the Objectification of a designer’s Experience of participating in a Design Project.

As mentioned above, a Project is an Activity. If the project is done, the Activity is ended.

How can a designer keep a finished Project and share it with others?

We can’t grasp an Activity, we can only make a copy of our experiences. Making a copy of experiences means objectifying loose ideas and memory into concrete and solid objects.

Once we make a Portfolio that contains our experiences of running a design project, we can share it with others. It becomes an outside thing, a representation of our talent and creative life.

In the social setting of Business, the Inside-Outside Boundary has some critical issues which are related to the Project — Portfolio Gap:

Collective v.s. Individual
Deep v.s. Surface
Private v.s. Public
Past v.s. Future

If a design project is a collaborative activity, then it is hard to separate individual contributions from the collaborative process. A designer has to carefully select perspectives and languages to express his/her experience in a portfolio.

Sometimes, we can find internal conflicts within a design project. In the real-life world, these conflicts are significant to the design activity. According to Activity Theory, contradictions drive the development of an activity system. However, a designer tends to avoid these deep issues in a portfolio.

Many companies have social media policy that indicates the rules for sharing information about business activities on digital platforms. A design project is private while a design portfolio is public. A designer has to respect this boundary.

A portfolio is based on a finished project. While portfolios are about the Future, Projects are about the Past. It requires a designer to curate his/her creative life in a meaningful whole. I’d like to quote Kelly Farr’s comment on this issue:

As a recruiter, I agree. It feels unfair to expect designers to keep up a portfolio in addition to working their full-time job. (It’s hard to even keep a resume updated when you’re happily employed!) When layoffs happen, it’s even more problematic as people suddenly find themselves on the market without a maintained portfolio.

It’s not easy to solve these issues in general. How do you cope with these challenges?

p.s. I am working on a project called “Design as Creative Life” which aims to explore designers’ Subjective Experiences and Project Engagement.