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Situational Note-taking: The Continuous Curation of Second-order Experience

Oliver Ding
Curativity Center
Published in
18 min readJan 6, 2024

A Case Study

The above picture was used as a metaphor for my 2022 book Creative Life Curation: Turning Experiences into Meaningful Achievements.

“Creative Life Curation” refers to turning Life Experiences into Developmental Resources, and Meaningful Achievement.

Why did I choose this picture?

It refers to a metaphor:

  • First-order Experience refers to Normal Life Experiences. The girl sees the ocean.
  • Second-order Experience refers to Creative Life Curation. We need to curate pieces of normal life experiences into a meaningful whole.

How can we do it?

According to Curativity Theory, we need a container to turn pieces into a meaningful whole.

We need a frame to frame life experiences.

The frame brings us a Second-order Experience.

In the past several days, I wrote a series of short posts for my 2023 annual review:

Today I will use these posts as an example of “Creative Life Curation” and discuss three related ideas:

  • The “GAP” project
  • The theme of “Continuous Curation”
  • The theme of “Second-order Experience”

Let’s start with Curativity Theory and the General Curation Framework.

1. A Brief of Curativity Theory

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

The core idea of Curativity Theory is very simple:

In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need Container as part 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

Curativity theory is all about understanding the structure and dynamics of these three statuses.

The theory adopted James Gibson’s “Affordance”, George Lakoff’s “Container” and Donald Schön’s “Reflection” as epistemological tools. I also developed my concepts to solve some issues. These concepts comprise a new approach to discussing Curativity. See the diagram below.

Originally, I called it the Gibson — Lakoff — Schön approach. Later, I realized this approach can be seen as a new approach for practice studies. Thus, I renamed it the Ecological Practice approach (v1, 2019). You can find more details in Curativity Theory and The Ecological Practice Approach (v2, 2020).

Later, I worked on the applications of the theory and wrote two books: Knowledge Curation (2020–2022) and Creative Life Curation (2022).

These three books form a simple two-level hierarchy: THEORY — APPLICATION.

2. The General Curation Framework

In order to connect THEORY and PRACTICE, I developed the General Curation Framework.

Why do I use the term General Curation?

Museum curators and Art curators tend to use Curatorial Practice to refer to their professional activities. I consider Curatorial Practice as a subcategory of General Curation. From the perspective of Curativity Theory, the following social practices are considered part of the family of General Curation.

  • Educational activities.
  • Event organizing and curating.
  • Web content curation.
  • Knowledge Curation.
  • Publishing and editing a catalog or a magazine.
  • Toy Curation.
  • Grocery shopping and other types of shopping.
  • etc.

Thus, the General Curation is about social practices that require Selecting, Collecting, Organizing, Presenting, and Reflecting. It goes beyond the scope of traditional professional Curatorial Practice. See the diagram below.

The above diagram highlights several pairs of concepts:

  • Pieces v.s. Whole
  • Whole v.s. Container
  • Collect v.s. Present
  • Actor v.s. Audience
  • Experience v.s. Theme

As an application of Curativity Theory, the above General Curation Framework represents the structure and dynamics of general curation practice. The activity of general curation aims to collect pieces of things into a meaningful whole in order to present a theme to a group audience.

There are three immanent contradictions within the activity of curating: “pieces — whole”, “things — themes” and “curator — audience”. For the first dichotomy, I use the concept of “Container” to balance the pieces and whole. For the last dichotomy, I use the notion of “Everyone A Curator” to deconstruct the concept of “Curator” because I want to claim that the activity of curating is a general social practice.

The dichotomy of “things — themes” refers to two classical great debates of social science: “mind — matter” and “individual — collective.” After reviewing the concept of “theme” in various disciplines such as Cultural Anthropology, Counseling Psychology, Cognitive Psychology, and the Philosophy of Science, I developed a new concept “Themes of Practice” to propose a process view of “Theme.”

The General Curation Framework identifies three types of containers:

  • Physical Containers: Shipping containers, Bowls, Rooms, Places…
  • Social Containers: Families, Communities, Schools, Groups, Events…
  • Cognitive Containers: Frameworks, Concepts, Diagrams, Models, Theories…

We can consider them as three dimensions for understanding the concept of Container. For example, a book is both a physical container and a cognitive container.

3. The “GAP” Project

On Dec 8, 2023, I wrote a post titled The Art of Situational Note-taking: Running the “GAP” Project.

I use the “GAP” project to refer to some informal projects between two formal projects. The idea was inspired by the Gap year:

A gap year, also known as a sabbatical year, is a period of time when students take a break from their studies, usually after completing high school or before beginning graduate school. During this time, students engage in a variety of educational and developmental activities, such as traveling, working, volunteering, or taking courses. Gap years are not limited to a year-long break and can range from several months to a few years.

Source: Wikipedia

We can use the “After | Before” structure to define two types of “GAP” projects.

  • The “After” Project: such as Creative Life Curation
  • The “Before” Project: such as Creative Life Discovery

Let’s see an example of a Creative Life Curation project.

I had a wonderful 10-day road trip with my wife and two little sons from June 24 to July 3.

During the busy trip, I couldn’t write notes with details. To record exciting moments and engaging experiences, I used short meaningful keywords to capture some insights while taking pictures.

These short meaningful keywords are Situational Themes of my life.

After returning to Houston, I listed 21 situational themes of the trip and wrote some notes. Eventually, I decided to use the ECHO Way model to reflect on the trip and conduct a “Creative Life Curation” project.

The above picture is the overview of the project.

  • Project (Actions) → Stories (Notes) → Model → Creative Work

The 10-day road trip was a project that included a series of actions. After the project was completed, it became my life Experience.

I worked on reflecting on these life experiences and produced a series of new creations.

I use “life as continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought.” You can’t use a knife to cut a stream, you only can use a container to contain it.

If I do nothing with my subjective experiences of the 10-day road trip. It is only my memory. If I want to share it with others, I have to write notes, take pictures, record the trip, etc. In this way, I made Stories of the trip for a social communicative context.

Though I didn’t write notes with details, I made 21 situational themes of the trip. These themes are Personal Signs which refer to my Subjective Meanings of the trip. These themes can be seen as micro-stories.

As a “Creative Life Curation” activity, it goes beyond normal storytelling and social media sharing. It moves from the Story level to the Model level. I adopted the ECHO Way model as a tool to analyze the deep structure of these themes.

In this way, I can run a “Creative Life Curation” project and turn pieces of life experiences into meaningful Creative Work.

The outcome of a creative project could be a book, board, or cards. I made a series of Thematic Network Diagrams on a Miro board.

I also made a series of cards for 21 situational themes and created a board on Milanote.

It was fun to make 21 digital thematic cards and physical cards.

You can find more details in TALE: One 10-day Road Trip, 21 Thematic Cards.

4. The Life Experience Curation Model

The ECHO Trip used the following model to guide the project:

  • Project (Actions) → Stories (Notes) → Model → Creative Work

There is a General Model behind this Situational Model. See the diagram below below. The model was originally developed for understanding the development of tacit knowledge in Jan 2022. Later, I also used the “Experience — Story — Model” schema to mention it.

For the present discussion, I’d like to use “Life Experience Curation” to name this model.

I used a metaphor to frame a three-layer structure for understanding the context of Developing Tacit Knowledge. Both Situational Themes and Life Themes are related to Tacit Knowledge.

I use “continuous flow” as a metaphor to describe Life and Experience. This metaphor is inspired by William James’ metaphor “Stream of Thought”.

James used a group of metaphors around the notion of “Stream of Thought.” According to Jeffrey V. Osowski, the following other metaphors or images were part of the stream family (1989, p.132): train, chain, path, current (both water and electric), channel, line (with segments), procession, kaleidoscope, and fabric. “By using these metaphors, James was able to capture the concepts of continuity, constant change, direction, connectedness, pace, rhythm, and flow, all of which were important characteristics of thought or consciousness.”

James used the stream metaphor to reject the British empiricists’ view of consciousness which refers to the chain or train metaphor. According to James:

“Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as “chain” or “train” do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A “river” or a “stream” are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness or of subjective life. (vol. 1, p.239)

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/her 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.

The Experience layer is the ground of Developing Tacit Knowledge and the source of Story and Model.

The Story layer refers to the level of social communicative context. At this level, a person could tell his journey of developing tacit knowledge with others. To make a clear statement, I make two types of stories. While Story 1 refers to the Actual Narrative, Story 2 is framed by Cultural Significance. Story 1 emphasizes the Architecture aspect of the Story layer while Story 2 emphasizes the Relevance aspect of the Story layer.

Story 1 refers to the real story which is not told yet. Story 1 is a set of immediate actions (experience) with a structure. The structure could be a planned project, a real project, and an imagined project.

Story 2 refers to told stories that are framed by Cultural Significance. Once a person starts to share his stories with others, he must consider Relevance in the communicative context. Thus, there is a difference between Story 1 and Story 2.

At the Story layer, a person could know the themes of his/her stories and the structure of his/her stories. However, this type of knowing is based on Synthesis. If he/she wants to explore the Analysis-type of knowing, he/she needs models.

A model is not a reality, but by modeling reality, we have a special way of knowing. By using models, a person could explore the knowing of Analysis. For example, I used the canvas of Thematic Space to review my “Activity” thematic space. The process, the result, and the value are totally different from the Story layer.

However, we should remember the model is not our destination. The model is a mediating instrument for producing our outcome of tacit knowing activities. We need to return to the Story layer from the Model layer. We need to transform insights from Analysis into actionable guides by Synthesis.

Finally, the actionable guides should transform into real actions in ecological situations and return to the Experience layer.

I also used the “Flow — Story — Model” metaphor to call the “Experience — Story — Model” schema. It is also inspired by James G. March (1928–2018) who was an American political scientist, sociologist, and a pioneer of organizational decision-making. He mentioned that there are three types of wisdom in his 2010 book The Ambiguities of Experience.

What are the three types of wisdom?

  • Models: a model is an abstract cognitive representation.
  • Stories: a story is a model too, but it is easy to understand.
  • Actions: you just do it, then you get it.

What March suggested roughly echoes three types of social sciences.

  • Models: Explanation (such as Systems and Rational Choices)
  • Stories: Understanding (such as Culture and Subjective meanings)
  • Actions: Intervention (Such as Critical theory and Action Science)

Traditionally, researchers tend to use “perception, conception, and action” as three keywords to discuss mind-related topics. From the perspective of Curativity Theory which is about turning pieces into a meaningful whole, I want to expand the foundation of mind-related topics from three keywords to four keywords.

From the perspective of Curativity Theory, ordinary people need to add “Curation” to develop their minds.

Originally, I called this notion “the Epistemology of Curation” and used it to refer to considering pieces of perceiving experience, concepts, and actions at a level and moving to a higher level to curate these pieces into a meaningful whole.

This theoretical consideration leads to two meanings: 1) we can adopt Multiple Perspectives to understand One Thing, and 2) we can adopt One Perspective to understand a Group of Things.

the “Experience — Story — Model” schema and “the Epistemology of Curation” are the foundation of the Creative Life Curation method. You can find more details about them in Thematic Space: Flow, Film, and Floor Plan and Slow Cognition: The Curated Mind.

It’s time to officially rename it the “Life Experience Curation” model and put it into the Creative Life Curation toolkit.

The difference between the General Curation Framework and the Life Experience Curation model is the latter only focuses on “Life Experiences as Pieces”.

5. The Chain of Second-order Experience

Now let’s return to the series of posts about my 2023 annual review.

How many actions are behind these posts? We can use the simple pattern below to answer this question. For each post, I made four actions:

  • Reflect on the Experience (a Thinking action)
  • Make a diagram to represent my insight on Miro (a Drawing action)
  • Write a post to explain the diagram on Medium (a Writing action)
  • Share the post on Linkedin and Twitter (a Sharing action)

5.1 How did I take the “Thinking” actions?

Let’s review my mental focus behind each post:

5.2 Jan 1, 2024

This post is about the major outcome of my creative journey in 2023. I used “Aspects of Early Discovery” to name a series of possible books I wrote in 2023.

The “Thinking” action is Reflected in my 2023 annual themes.

On Jan 17, 2023, I wrote a post titled How to Set Annual Themes for 2023?

I use a simple strategy called “Double Themes”. Each year, I set two annual themes.

Theme #1: continuously working on an existing theme

Theme #2: explore a new possible theme

Theme #1 is about the Refinement of the existing Theme Network.

Theme #2 is about the Expansion of the existing Theme Network.

On that day, I selected the following two themes for 2023.

The theme of “Thematic Engagement” led to the TALE project. TALE stands for Thematic Analysis Learning Engagement. You can find more details here and a review about it.

The theme of “Value Circle” led to the Value Circle project. You can find more details in A Possible Theme called “Value Circle”.

The theme of “Early Discovery” appeared in June 2023. It is the “Theme #2B”!

I didn’t finish the Value Circle project in 2023. However, I closed several projects and edited four books around the theme of “Early Discovery”.

5.3 Jan 2, 2024

In this post, I reflected on two diagrams about “Concept System” and asked the following questions:

  1. Why didn’t I make the second diagram in June 2023?
  2. Why didn’t I offer details about the evolving concept system in June 2023?
  3. What’s the difference between a “Frame for Work” and a “Framework”?

5.4 Jan 3, 2024

On Dec 31, 2023, I updated the diagram “Oliver Ding’s World of Works” which collects 26 possible books I wrote from 2019 to Dec 2023.

On Jan 1, 2023, I reflected on the diagram.

I asked myself a question:

Can I use a new diagram to curate these books?

What did this question mean?

I was using the technique of “Continuous Curation” to explore something new.

On Jan 2, 2024, I made a new diagram.

I selected 15 books for the Knowledge Engagement project and curated them into 6 thematic spaces.

Inspired by the above action, I continuously did the same thing around the last three posts.

On Jan 3, 2024, I also recognized that this series of posts could be seen as a Creative Life Curation post. This insight anticipated this post.

5.5 Jan 4, 2024

I curated 15 possible books around the Ecological Practice Approach.

5.6 Jan 4, 2024

In this post, I curated 12 possible books around the Developmental Project Model.

5.7 Jan 5, 2024

The last post is about a challenge. I used to use a Network to curate my 26 possible books. On Jan 4, 2024, I asked the following question:

Can I turn it into a hierarchical structure?

It was just an exercise of curation.

However, the outcome is fantastic! I made a meaningful tree of my thoughts.

5.8 How did I take the “Drawing” actions?

See the diagram below. I worked on the file titled “26 Possible Books” and created a new Frame (Frame 34) as the creative space for this short project.

See the screenshot below.

It’s important to notice that I placed all 26 images in one place (Frame 34). In this way, I can easily put my new ideas into real action.

5.9 The “Experience — Action” Transformation

Let’s use the model below to discuss the “Experience — Action” Transformation.

Let’s start with the first post which is about my 2023 annual review.

  • Action 1: my several creative knowledge projects in 2023
  • First-order Experience 1: my creative journey of running these projects
  • Curation 1: I used the First-order Experience as raw material to run an annual life reflection and wrote a post. This is a Creative Life Curation project.
  • Conception 1: I used “Aspects of Early Discovery” as the primary theme of the First-order Experience
  • Second-order Experience 1: I wrote a post about the Conception.
  • Perception 1: I noticed that there is a connection between two diagrams about “Concept System”.

How did the first post lead to the second post? The above Perception 1 led to the second post:

  • Perception 1: I noticed that there is a connection between two diagrams about “Concept System”
  • Conception 2: I reflected on the connection between two diagrams about “Concept System” with several questions.
  • Curation 2: I considered the case as an example of the distinction between “Frame for Work” and “Framework”.
  • Action 2: I wrote the second post titled Situational Note-taking: “Frame for work” and “Framework”.
  • First-order Experience 2: I created the first diagram on June 4, 2023, and the second diagram on Nov 25, 2023.
  • Second-order Experience 2: I organized images of 26 possible books and several diagrams within “Frame 34” on Miro.
  • Perception 2: I watched “Frame 34” and perceived a new possibility: I could play the card sorting with these 26 images.

How did the second post lead to the third post? It doesn’t directly lead to the third post. But “Frame 34” became the source of my creative insights.

  • Perception 2: I watched “Frame 34” and perceived a new possibility: I could play the card sorting with these 26 images.
  • Conception 3: I used the theme of “Knowledge Engagement” to select 15 possible books from a total of 26 possible books.
  • Curation 3: I used 6 thematic spaces to curate these 15 books.
  • Action 3: I made a new diagram for these 15 books and wrote the third post titled Situational Note-taking: The Art of Knowledge Engagement (15 Possible Books).
  • First-order Experience 3: I worked on several projects about the theme of “Knowledge Engagement”.
  • Second-order Experience 3: I discovered 6 thematic spaces and made a new diagram.
  • Perception 3: I perceived a pattern behind my actions of making three posts. I recognized that this series of posts could be seen as a Creative Life Curation post. This insight anticipated this post.

On Jan 4, 2023, the Perception 3 led to a significant insight. Following the third post, I continuously did the same thing around the last three posts.

The 2023 annual review transformed into a new “GAP” project. It became the first knowledge project of 2024!

6. The Art of “Continuous Curation”

This tiny Creative Life Curation project only has seven posts. We can see 26 possible books as Pieces. Each diagram can be seen as a Meaningful Whole.

What can we learn from this project?

It’s a tiny example of “Continuous Curation”.

Each time, I selected several possible books from the pool, used a primary theme to frame the creative space, and discovered several thematic spaces to frame these possible books.

This is the process of “Frame — Unframe — Reframe”.

Each diagram is a situational framework.

Building a new situational framework means we discover a particular configuration of a network of some pieces. If we call this process Frame, then Unframe means detaching these pieces from the particular configuration.

We can also use Reframe to refer to re-attaching these pieces together around a new configuration. During the Reframe phase, we may remove some pieces, or add some new pieces.

As mentioned above, the concept of Curativity is all about “Pieces, Container, and Whole”. See the diagram below.

26 possible books are Pieces. Each time I selected a primary Theme:

  • Jan 3: the theme of “Knowledge Engagement”
  • Jan 4: the theme of “Ecological Practice”
  • Jan 4: the theme of “Developmental Project Model+”
  • Jan 5: the theme of “Tree of Thoughts”

Each time, I also discover several thematic spaces to define a Container.

The Jan 3 post used the following 6 thematic spaces:

  • Creative Course
  • Early Discovery
  • Late Bloom
  • Project Engagement
  • Spirit of Unification
  • Social Support

The Jan 4 post about “Ecological Practice” used the following 6 thematic spaces and one theme to frame six thematic spaces.

  • Curativity
  • Attachance
  • Themes of Practice
  • Supportance
  • Lifesystem Framework
  • Application

The Jan 4 post about the “Developmental Project Model” used the following connections to frame 8 thematic spaces.

  • DPM+Activity Theory
  • DPM+Attachance Theory
  • DPM+Knowledge Center
  • DPM+ECHO (The ECHO Way)
  • DPM+Value Circle
  • DPM+AAS (Anticipatory Activity System)
  • DPM+PDF (Persona Dynamics Framework)
  • DPM+CLC (Creative Life Curation)

The Jan 5 post used the following 8 thematic spaces:

  • Container (Containee)
  • Whole (Pieces)
  • Theme (Concept)
  • Social (Cognition)
  • Life (Self)
  • Career (Project)
  • Activity (Knowledge)
  • Diagram (Framework)

As the curator, I am also the first audience of each diagram.

The art of “Continuous Curation” is to keep reframing.

Related Books (Drafts)

Notes
Notetaking
Life Reflections
Curation
Curation Matters

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Oliver Ding
Curativity Center

Written by Oliver Ding

877 Followers
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Founder of CALL(Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.

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