Slow Cognition: How did I develop Curativity Theory?

Apply the “X as Y” technique three times

This article is part of the Slow Cognition project (phase II). My original intention behind the Slow Cognition project is to adopt Howard E. Gruber’s approach and method to studying creative work. While Phase I of the Slow Cognition project focuses on Instruments (the Thematic Space Canvas, etc), Phase II returns to its original focus: Methods (the Historical-cognitive approach, etc).

Today I am going to share my experience of developing Curativity Theory with the “X as Y” technique. From August 2018 to March 2019, I wrote a book titled Curativity: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice.

During the process, I use the “X as Y” technique to guide my theoretical development with the following three stages:

• Stage 1: Bagging as Curation
• Stage 2: Curation as Practice
• Stage 3: Practice as Curation

I use the “X as Y” technique for both three stages, but with different purposes. The Bagging as Curation stage is about considering Bagging as a phenomenon of curation. The Curation as Practice stage adopts the Practice-centered theory to understand the phenomenon of curation. The Practice as Curation stage develops a Curation-centered theory to understand Social Practices.

There is also a technique called “Creative Attachance” between the process. First, I detached my focus from Stage 1 and attached it to Stage 2, this “Attachance” is about Thematic Generalization because I moved to general curation practice in Stage 2.

Second, I detached my focus from Stage 2 and attached it to Stage 3, this “Attachance” is about Thematic Reverse because I changed the meanings of both “Practice” and “Curation”.

Contents

Part 1: Bagging as Curation

1.1 The BagTheWeb Project
1.2 The Curating Activity System
1.3 Container, Theme, and Action
1.4 Pieces, Parts, and Whole
1.5 Curation Theory
1.6 The Concept of “Curativity”

Part 2: Curation as Practice

2.1 Approaching Practice Theories
2.2 The Practice Turn
2.3 Challenge as Opportunity
2.4 A took-kit approach

Part 3: Practice as Curation

3.1 “Practice System” v.s. Activity Theory
3.2 The “Curatorial Zone”
3.3 The Curativity of Culture

Part 4: Reflections

4.1 Attachance 1: “Bagging as Curation” to “Curation Theory”
4.2 Attachance 2: “Curation Theory” to “Curation as Practice”
4.3 Attachance 3: “Curation as Practice” to “Practice as Curation”
4.4 The Final Words

Part 1: Bagging as Curation

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.

In the first stage, I didn’t want to write a book and develop a new theory. I just wanted to use BagTheWeb as an example to conduct a research project with Activity Theory in August 2018.

Why did I want to do it in August 2018? Because I failed on applying Activity Theory to study BagTheWeb in April 2018. So, I decided to try it again after four months.

1.1 The BagTheWeb Project

In April 2018, I reflected on an early project BagTheWeb which is a web content curation tool. I adopted the Activity System model and the idea of “mediated artifact” from Activity Theory to develop a framework for understanding the BagTheWeb project and the Curating activity in general.

The structure of human activity (Yrjö Engeström, 1987, p.94)

The above diagram is the Activity System model which was developed by Finnish educational researcher and Activity Theorist Yrjö Engeström in 1987. A core idea behind the diagram is “mediation.” According to Kaptelinin and Nardi, “The concept of tools does not describe all types of technologies…Can the use of artifacts that are not tools be described as mediation? Currently, activity theory is not quite clear on this issue. On the one hand, the notion of mediation in activity theory is clearly not limited to tools. For instance, the activity system model proposed by Engeström (1987) includes three types of mediators. Besides tools (mediating the relationship between the subject and the object) the model also describes rules (mediating the relationship between the subject and the community) and the division of labor (mediating the relationship between the community and the object). In principle, nothing prevents us from considering environments as mediators of human interaction with the world.” (2006, pp.255–256)

The notion of mediation in activity theory and the above diagram inspired me to reflect on the BagTheWeb project. BagTheWeb is a web content curation application that has been in operation since 2010. I am the chief information architect of the project. As a web curation tool, BagTheWeb lets users collect information pieces and store them in an “information container” — a bag, as we call it. Created by a user, a bag has a specific theme that is usually written in its title. A bag has five components including theme (title and description), bagged web content cards (weblinks and embedded content), original notes, related bags, and identity information (author, URL, image icon, created date, modified date, etc).

A Bag page (2011 version)

The above screenshot shows an early version of the UI design of Bag. I also led a redesign project around 2012 and we launched a new version in 2013. The new version allows users to write original notes (see the screenshot below) which supports Markdown format.

A Note (2013 version)

While Bagged web content is bagged from the Web, original notes are bagged from the Mind. In order to build a model for describing the BagTheWeb project and the curating activity in general, I selected six elements: Actor, World, Mind, Web, Theme, and Bag.

The above diagram was modified from the above Activity System model diagram. The original six elements were replaced with Bag-related elements. I wrote an email to my co-workers who are team members of the BagTheWeb project. The sentences below are quoted from my original email:

• First, I add “theme” as the “mediated artifact” between “subject” and “object”.
• Second, I add “web” as the “mediated artifact” between “world” and “theme”.
• Third, I add “bag” as the “mediated artifact” between “actor” and “theme”.
• Fourth, I add “mind” as the middle element between “actor” and “world”. The mind is not a mediated artifact, but a channel for an actor to understand the world.
• Then, I built my own version of the Activity System diagram for BagTheWeb. This diagram uses the same visual format of the third-generation Activity Theory diagram which was developed by Yrjö Engeström in 1987, but my version’s content is different from Engestrom’s version.
• Check out this Slideshare to know more about the evolution of Activity Theory: https://www.slideshare.net/mpaskevi/activity-theory-presentation-tielab

1.2 The Curating Activity System

Based on the diagram for BagTheWeb, I built a general version for all kinds of Curating Activities including talent curation, museum curation, and more. The key step is replacing Bag with Container while replacing Web with Network. See the diagram below.

The final version created three pair concepts:

• Actor — World
• Container — Network
• Mind — Theme

Also, we can see two groups of elements:

• Personal side: Actor — Container — Mind
• Social side: World — Network — Theme

In this way, I built a model called Curating Activity System for discussing the Curating Activity in general by reflecting on my practice of BagTheWeb with theoretical resources from Activity Theory.

I told my coworkers, “Anyway, this is just an academic exercise, it is not related to business plan writing.” However, I found the Curating Activity System model has its business practical value in later 2018 when we work on a new project. I just use the model to inspire our product discovery. That was a fantastic experience for me. I realized that this is an example of organizational knowledge creation.

Though I was satisfied with the Curating Activity System model because I built abstract knowledge that can be used for different products, I realized that I was wrong in understanding the Activity System model and Activity Theory in general.

If you compare the Curating Activity System diagram with the original Activity System model diagram, you will find the same visual layout. But, my conceptualization is a totally different thing. My six elements don’t correspond to the Activity System model’s six elements. Moreover, I didn’t realize that I work on developing a model for individual curating activity, and the Activity System model is for studying collective activities.

Thus, I coined the term Misdiagramming to encourage myself to remember this mistake. Though the final result of the Curating Activity System is fine, the process indicated that I didn’t precisely understand the Activity System model and Activity Theory. I was tricked by my own visual preference because the visual layout is easy to adopt while the conceptual structure is hard to learn.

1.3 Container, Theme, and Action

In August 2018, I returned to the “Activity Theory — BagTheWeb” project. I started learning Ecological Psychology, Activity Theory, and other theories around 2014. I thought that I need to conduct at least one empirical study with these theories in order to improve my intellectual development. I just thought this is the “one more step”.

From August 2018 to September 2018, I reviewed academic papers about Curation and Practice theories. On Sept 14, 2018, I wrote an outline of a thesis titled Curation Theory: Container, Theme, and Action.

The outline is a 16-page file and I use one page for the outline of one chapter. Below are the titles of the 12 chapters.

• Chapter 1: Mind, World, and Web (the ontology issue)
• Chapter 2: Actor, World, and Theme (the epistemology issue)
• Chapter 3: Actor, Mind, and Place (the methodology issue)
• Chapter 4: Building BagTheWeb (empirical case study)
• Chapter 5: Bagging as Curatorial Practice (reflection-after-action)
• Chapter 6: Whole and Parts (theory development)
• Chapter 7: Container and Network (theory development)
• Chapter 8: Themes of Practice (theory development)
• Chapter 9: Curator as Actant (theory development)
• Chapter 10: Life with Curation (theory application and Call for action)
• Chapter 11: Curation for Social Change (theory application and Call for action)
• Chapter 12: Toward A Curation Science (theory application and Call for action)

The outlines indicate that I wanted to use the Curating Activity System model as the starting point for building Curation Theory. I also wanted to use the BagTheWeb case study as empirical research.

1.4 Pieces, Parts, and Whole

On Sept 20, 2018, I wrote a note and recorded a significant insight about the triad of “Pieces, Parts, and Whole” for the ontological definition of Curativity. Originally, I only considered the pair of concepts “Part and Whole”. From the above BagTheWeb example, I realized that the third element “Pieces” is important for Curation Theory. I also defined two types of Parts: Container and Network.

The “Pieces — Parts — Whole” triad defines a new worldview:

• The basic unit of the World is individual Pieces.
• Individual Pieces form Parts.
• The World is formed by Parts.
• “Whole as a World” is not possible to know and experience.
• People understand “Whole as a World” by knowing and experiencing “Part as a world”.

This worldview leads to a conclusion: the essence of Curation is curating Pieces into Parts in order to understand the World as a meaningful Whole.

For example, Adam Grant’s life and work can be understood as a “Whole as a World”, it’s not known and experienced by others. We can only know and experience Parts of Adam Grant’s world by reading his books, watching his TED talks, following his tweets, etc. An insight he shared in a TED talk or a tweet is considered a Piece.

1.5 Curation Theory

On Oct 2, 2018, I started writing v3 of the thesis in Chinese. The subtitle changed from Container, Themes, and Action to The Sciences and Art of Whole, Part, and Pieces. The v3 is a 32-page file, the v4 is a 40-page file, and the v5 is a 42-page file.

The v5 file is the foundation of Curativity Theory because it defines five concepts and each concept aims to answer one significant question.

• Curatorial Affordances: Why does Curation happen?
• Containers: Where does Curation happen?
• Themes of Practice: Curation is both an individual action and a social practice. How do we coordinate individual experiences and collective culture?
• Curatorial Configuration: How to understand the meaningful wholes?
• Curatorial Crafting: What’s the competence of Curation?

Later, the v5 file became Chapter 3 (Ecological Curation Theory) of the book Curativity. You can find more details in Curativity Theory: Table of Contents and Related Articles.

1.6 The Concept of “Curativity”

The v6 changed its title from Curation Theory to Curativity. While v6 is a 43-page file, v7 is a 53-page file.

Why did I use the term “Curativity” to replace “Curation Theory”?

See the screenshot below. I compared a set of terms about Curation with Creation and Organization, then I coined the new term “Curativity”.

What’s the difference between Curation and Creation? Both Curation and Creation aim to make a meaningful whole, Curation needs to Group a set of things together in order to make a new meaningful whole while Creation can Combine a set of things to make a brand new thing. For Curation, the original things keep their forms and content, but the context of these things is changed. For Creation, the original things disappear because the new whole is not a grouped whole, but a combined whole.

In order to highlight the ontological difference between Curation and Creation, I coined the new term “Curativity”. On Oct 3, 2018, I realized this insight and decided to use the term to name the new theory.

However, I just renamed the file again after three days. On Oct 6, 2018, I made the v8 file with a new name “Curation as Practice”.

Why did I do it? Because the v8 file expanded my ideas about “Curation as Practice”.

My mind was detached from “Bagging as Curation” which is a case study and attached to considering general curation as a social practice.

Inspired by the cognitive psychologist Daniel J. Levitin’s book The Organized Mind, I renamed the v3 file to The Curated Mind: Cognitive Container Theory and Practices on Jan 11, 2019. However, I didn’t work on the file because the v8 led in a new direction.

The following versions went further and focused on understanding Social Practice from the perspective of Curativity Theory.

Part 2: Curation as Practice

Why did I move from Mind/Cognition to Social Practice? There are three reasons.

• I want to learn some theories in order to reflect on my over 20 years of work experience.
• Since some of my good friends are experts in psychology and cognitive sciences, I want to do something outside the field of Mind/Cognition.
• The journey of learning Ecological Psychology guided me to the field of Social Practice.

2.1 Approaching Practice Theories

I have over twenty years of work experience which can be divided into three stages: the creative stage, strategic stage, and innovative stage. At the creative stage, I worked for the advertising and media industry as a creative copywriter and designer. At the strategic state, I worked for pre-IPO stage enterprises as a business strategist and fundraising consultant. At the innovative stage, I worked on making brand new digital tools and platforms as a researcher and designer.

Before 2014, I spent most of my spare time on digital nonprofit communities as a digital activist. From 2014 to 2015, I transformed my focus from nonprofit activities to theoretical learning. Since then, I have been spending most of my spare time learning ecological psychology, creativity research, and other related subjects.

2014–2020: Ecological Psychology and Creativity Research
2014–2018: Action Science, Activity Theory and Cognitive Science
2018–2019: Practice Theory, HCI, Strategy and Work
2020: Social Theory, Social Media, Information Systems and Platform

The above list indicates that social theory is the newest focus of my learning activity. I’d like to offer more details about my learning journey.

From 2015 to 2016, I focused on learning James G. Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception and Affordance Theory. I also read Ecological Psychologist Edward Reed’s books and Harry Heft’s Ecological Psychology in Context: James Gibson, Roger Barker, and the Legacy of William James.

In 2017, I started learning Roger G. Barker’s Behavior Settings theory. In 1989, Phil Schoggen published a book titled Behavior Settings which is a revision and extension of Roger G. Barker’s classic Ecological Psychology: Concepts and Methods for Studying the Environment of Human Behavior (1968). Karl A. Fox wrote a chapter for Schoggen’s edition and mentioned Goffman’s Frame Analysis and other ideas about social practice.

Then, I started reading Goffman’s Frame Analysis and other social theories. Eventually, Social Practice theories became the new focus of my learning journey.

The other focus is Activity Theory. I started learning Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory in 2014. Harry Heft doesn’t directly mention Activity Theory in his book, but he suggests that Lev Vygotsky’s Cultural-historical theory of psychology (which is the major theoretical resource of Activity Theory) is an option for expanding Ecological Psychology to the level of social analysis. Also, some scholars consider Activity Theory as one of the solutions o Social Practice theories.

The above picture shows some books about Social Practice Theories from my reading list.

2.2 The Practice Turn

Since 2001, a group of philosophers, sociologists, and scientists have rediscovered the practice perspective and used it as a lens to explore and examine the role of practices in human activity. Researchers called it The Practice Turn in Contemporary Theory. As Schatzki pointed out, “there is no unified practice approach”(2001, p.2).

Davide Nicolini introduced the following six different ways of theorizing practice in his 2013 book Practice Theory, Work, & Organization:

• Praxeology and the Work of Giddens and Bourdieu
• Communities of Practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991)
• Activity Theory / Cultural-historical activity theory (the Marxian/Vygotskian/Leont’evian tradition)
• Ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, 1954)
• The Site of Social (contemporary developments of the Heideggerian/Wittgensteinian traditions, by Theodore R. Schatzki)
• Conversation Analysis / Critical Discourse Analysis (the Foucauldian tradition)

Nicolini also pointed out, “Practice theories are fundamentally ontological projects in the sense that they attempt to provide a new vocabulary to describe the world and to populate the world with specific ‘units of analysis’; that is, practice. How these units are defined, however, is internal to each of the theories, and choosing one of them would thus amount to reducing the richness provided by the different approaches.” (2012, p.9)

As mentioned above, I planned to use one chapter to discuss “Bagging as Curation” from the perspective of Activity Theory in v1. However, I changed my mind in v3 because v1 only considered the BagTheWeb project as the only case. In the v3 file, I planned to develop a general theoretical framework about curation and listed several case studies such as Adam Grant’s TED Talk, James March, TED Conferences, TEDx Program, Slideshare.net, BagTheWeb.com, Houston FOTO FEST, etc.

I also found an author who adopted Activity Theory to research Curation. So, I thought that my thesis couldn’t make a contribution to others if I adopted Activity Theory as the main framework.

I needed to do something differently.

I reviewed several social practice theories and returned to Ecological Psychology eventually because I didn’t find a theoretical account considering the concept of Affordance as their starting point.

If I wanted to start with the concept of Affordance, I need to develop the framework by myself. I knew it is hard work, but I decided to do it.

Why did I decide to do it?

Because I knew some creators tend to make tools for themselves and some creations are originally internal tools. I accepted the challenge as an opportunity.

2.3 Challenge as Opportunity

I started from the core idea of “Container — Theme” and adopted James Gibson’s “Affordance”, George Lakoff’s “Container” and Donald Schön’s “Reflection” as epistemological tools. Originally, I called the framework the “Gibson — Lakoff — Schön” solution. Later, I renamed it the Ecological Practice approach.

My first step was developing a thing called the “Action Practice” System. See the diagram below. The concept of Affordance is an important theoretical concept for understanding human—material engagement.

What’s Affordance? Let’s have a look at the original definition made by Gibson:

The affordances of the environment are what it offers the animal, what it provides or furnishes, either for good or ill. The verb to afford is found in the dictionary, but the noun affordance is not. I have made it up. I mean by it something that refers to both the environment and the animal in a way that no existing term does. It implies the complementarity of the animal and the environment. (p.119)

Though the core of Gibson’s theory is visual perception, we can see the whole “Perception-Affordance-Action” loop as a theory of action and apply it to new fields. Perceiving affordances is for taking actions, taking actions has an impact on the environment and changes the affordances of the environment.

I used “Affordance — Objects — Acts” to highlight a simple system of Action.

The above diagram shows the goal of the second step: connecting the “life theme” and “culture theme” by developing the concept of “Themes of Practice”.

Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed a theoretical “theme” for studying culture. Career counseling therapists and psychologists also developed a theoretical concept called “life theme.” If we put cultural themes and life themes together, we see a great debate in social science: “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”.

“Themes of Practice” is not a new type of theme, but the process of transformation between “Life themes” and “Culture themes”.

Following the concept of “Themes of Practice”, the third step is defining the “Activity Practice” System. See the above diagram. The “Activity Practice” system is inspired by Activity Theory. The term “Activities” refers to the concept of “Activity” which is a high-level container of actions from the perspective of Activity Theory. The term “Artifacts” refers to the concept of “Mediating Instruments” of Activity Theory. However, Activity Theory doesn’t consider “Themes of Practice” or “Theme”.

Finally, I merged the “Action Practice” system and the “Activity Practice” system together. See the above diagram.

2.4 A took-kit approach

On Oct 5, 2018, I finished the v7 file with the above “Practice System” Diagram. Later, the “Practice System” model expanded to Chapter 4 (Curation as Practice) of Curativity.

I roughly reviewed the historical development of the Practice Turn in social science and the relationship between Ecological Psychology and the Practice Turn. Finally, I used a set of theoretical concepts (see the diagram below) to develop a theoretical framework. Originally, I called it the Gibson — Lakoff — Schön approach. Later, I realized it can be seen as a new approach to practice studies. Thus, I renamed it the Ecological Practice approach.

In a broad sense, the Ecological Practice approach has its philosophical roots in traditional Pragmatism and contemporary embodied cognitive science. Inspired by practice studies theorist Davide Nicolini (2013)’s “tool-kit approach” which curates various concepts from different theoretical accounts based on a family relationship, allowing a network of dissimilarities and similarities, I consider the Ecological Practice approach a toolkit too.

Part 3: Practice as Curation

When did I move to stage 3: Practice as Curation?

On Oct 10, 2018, I made a new version of the above “Practice System” diagram in the v9 file. I realized that I shouldn’t combine “Artifacts” and “Objects” together. There is also a difference between “Activities” and “Acts”.

I inserted a space between the “Action Practice” system and the “Activity Practice” system. Now the new diagram has the following spaces:

• Material Zone: the original “Action Practice” system
• Action Zone: the middle space
• Social Zone: the original “Activity Practice” system

The term “Social Zone” refers to “Sociocultural Zone” or “Cultural Zone”.

3.1 “Practice System” v.s. Activity Theory

What does the “Action Zone” means?

This three-space model is similar to Activity Theory’s hierarchy.

Source: Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi (Acting with Technology, 2006, p.64)

The hierarchical structure of activity was originally conceptualized by A. N. Leontiev (1978). We have to notice that Leontiev wanted to develop a psychological theory at the individual level with the concept of Activity. Thus, we will see three levels of activity correspond to three levels of psychological notions. The three levels of activity are Activity, Actions, and Operations. The three levels of psychological notions are Motive, Goals, and Conditions.

There is a difference between the “Practice System” (with “Action Zone”) model and Activity Theory. Though the term “Artifacts” refers to the concept of “Mediating Instruments” of Activity Theory. However, Activity Theory doesn’t consider “Themes of Practice” or “Theme”.

Also, Activity Theorists use the concept of “Affordance” to connect to “Operation”. I suggested another way to adopt the concept of affordance to activity theory. Instead of matching the existing three levels of hierarchy of activity, the concept of affordance can be considered as a new level for extending the scope of the hierarchy of activity. In other words, affordance can be a new unit of analysis of activity theory and other practice theories.

At the general philosophical level, both ecological psychology and activity theory share the same view of the inseparability of human beings and the world. Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie A. Nardi claimed, “In Western thought the fundamental insight of the inseparability of subjects and objects is expressed, for instance, in the philosophical views of Hegel and Marx, Goethe’s poetry, Brentano’s ‘act psychology’, and the ecological psychology of Gibson.” (2012, p.13)

However, there is an important theoretical difference between ecological psychology and activity theory. Activity theorists define the “activity” as “object-oriented”, according to Leontiev, “Any activity of an organism is directed at a certain object; an ‘objectless’ activity is impossible” (Leontiev, 1981). Ecological psychologists don’t use “activity” as a theoretical concept, they use “action” and “activity” interchangeably. Ecological psychologist Edward S. Reed (1996) pointed out there are two kinds of action, “We should thus differentiate between two kinds of activity, performatory and exploratory — because the selective contingencies are very different for the two cases. Exploratory activity, as I call the scanning for and use of information (following James Gibson; see Reed, 1988a) typically does not require the expenditure of a significant amount of force to alter the substances or surfaces of the environment. Instead, it involves the adjustment of the head and sensory organs to the ambient energy fields. These adjustments are typically embodied in cyclic, low-energy and low-impact movements of the sense organs or the head. The selective advantage thus obtainable is that of having information useful for regulating one’s activity pattern. These latter performatory activities are precisely those cases in which the animal does use significant amounts of force to alter the substances and surfaces of its environment. It is one thing to see or to smell a piece of food, it is quite another thing to obtain it, masticate it, and eat it — and this applies whether one is a dragonfly or a mammalian carnivore.”(1996, pp. 80–81)

The operation level of Activity Theory can’t cover the meaning of the concept of exploratory action. The exploratory action goes beyond the scope of activity theory. Thus, the “Possible level — Affordances — Exploratory action” combination is a heterogeneous theoretical resource to Activity Theory.

3.2 The “Curatorial Zone”

On Oct 12, 2018, I renamed the “Action Zone” to “Curatorial Zone” in the v10 file. See the diagram below.

I also changed the name of the diagram to “Practice as Curation”.

Why did I rename it? What did the new name mean?

The “X as Y” technique uses X as Nail and Y as Hammer. The old name “Curation as Practice” considered “Curation” as a nail while “Practice” as a hammer. It means I can use “Practice Theories” to understand “Curation Practice”.

The new name “Practice as Curation” considers “Curation” as a hammer while “Practice” as a nail. This means I want to use “Curation Theory” to understand “Social Practice”.

The above “Action Zone” model aims to discover the transformation between embodied material experience and collective social culture. I asked myself the following two questions:

• How do Objects (material things without sociocultural meanings) transform into Artifacts (material things with sociocultural meanings)?
• How do Acts (embodied experience) transform into Activities (sociocultural schemas)?

A common answer to these questions is to refer to Social Emergence.

For me, Curation is a possible answer too. However, this notion is not a normal view of Curation.

So, I used the term “Curativity Theory” to name this insight. I also defined the focus of “Curativity Theory” as the transformation between individual life experiences and collective social culture.

On Oct 14, 2018, I reused the word “Curativity” to name the v11 file. This time, it had a new meaning to me.

When I was working on the above versions of the book Curativity, I realized that I made three things.

• The concept of “Curativity”: It is an ontological level invention.
• The “Ecological Curation Theory”: It refers to the Ecological Practice approach to general curation practice.
• The “Curativity Theory”: It is a theory about the transformation between individual life experiences and collective culture.

3.3 The Curativity of Culture

The notion of “Curativity Theory” led to a new framework that expanded the above two questions to more pairs of concepts. See the diagram below:

The above original two questions only consider “Act — Activity” and “Object — Artifact”, the new framework expanded to six pairs of concepts from the following six dimensions:

• People (Actor — Curator)
• Actions (Act — Activity)
• Things (Object — Artifact)
• Information (Ecological Information — Semantic Information)
• Life (Lifeway — Lifeform)
• Psychological operations (Percept — Concept)

The details of the framework were presented in Chapter 5 (Practice as Curation) of the book Curativity.

The “Practice as Curation” framework challenged the traditional views of social practice and developed a new solution to practice studies and cultural studies. The solution is called “Practice as Curation” and it refers to using Curativity Theory to understand social practices and cultural life, especially the transformation between individual life experiences and collective social culture.

Later, I realized that the “Practice as Curation” framework is an application of Curativity Theory, so I use “the Curativity of Culture” to rename it.

Part 4: Reflections

Let’s mark some significant timestamps:

• Sept 20, 2018 — V1 — Bagging as Curation
• Oct 2, 2018 — V3 — Curation Theory
• Oct 5, 2018 — V7 — Curation as Practice
• Oct 14, 2018 — V11 — Practice as Curation

This was an amazing journey for me. Now we can use the concept of “Attachance” to analyze the whole process.

I coined the term Attachance by combining Attach and Chance in 2018 in order to discuss some ideas related to the concept of Affordance which is a core idea of Ecological Psychology.

Affordance means potential action opportunities offered by environments. I want to highlight the meaning and value of actual action itself, however, the term Affordance only refers to potential actions. Thus, I coined the term Attachance to emphasize the potential opportunities offered by actual actions, especially the attaching act and the detaching act:

• Attaching to an environment
• Detaching from an environment
• Attaching to an object
• Detaching from an object

The concept of Attachance works with the concept of Container together. See the diagram below.

The above diagram combines three core concepts of the Ecological Practice approach together: Affordance, Attachance, and Containance. For the Ecological Practice approach, the concept of “Container” can be understood from three dimensions: physical, social, and cognitive. For example, a physical environment is a container, a social activity is a container, and a theoretical framework is a container too.

For discussing the development of creative thoughts, especially in the case of developing Curativity Theory, I focus on 1) different theoretical frameworks as cognitive containers, and 2) writing different versions of the book as social (activity) containers.

4.1 Attachance 1: “Bagging as Curation” to “Curation Theory”

Detaching from v1(Bagging as Curation) and Attaching to v3 (Curation Theory)

I didn’t intend to write a 615-page book (the v40 is a 615-page draft). I just wanted to write a short thesis (maybe 50 pages) to share my ideas about Curation. I wrote the v1 file which is an outline of a thesis in English. However, I didn’t have enough confidence to write the whole thesis in English. So, I decided to write it in Chinese since it is my mother language. In this way, I didn’t have to deal with two challenges in one project: Writing in English and Theoretical Development.

Writing a book was not a challenge to me, because I didn’t set the goal of “writing a book” for the project.

Also, I considered BagTheWeb as the only case in v1. I changed my mind in v3 and considered several cases. I used “Ontological Inventen — Empirical Cases” to set a Container for this project. While “Ontological Invention” refers to Enter, “Empirical Cases” refers to Exit.

4.2 Attachance 2: “Curation Theory” to “Curation as Practice”

Detaching from v3 (Curation Theory) and Attaching to V7 (Curation as Practice)

The renaming of files indicates that I detached from reflecting on empirical cases and attached to searching for a practice-center theoretical solution for the project. This is the “Challenge-Response” of Container. The challenge is that I need an Epistemological Solution to connect Ontological Invention and Empirical Cases.

The hard thing is that I couldn’t find an existing account considering affordance as its starting point. I realized that if I want to use the Ecological Approach, I have to develop it in order to use it. In this way, I had to detach from the existing theoretical accounts and attached to a possible theoretical creative space.

At this moment, the project transformed from reflecting on my work experience with curation into reflecting on my learned knowledge about ecological psychology and social practice theories including Activity Theory.

4.3 Attachance 3: “Curation as Practice” to “Practice as Curation”

Detaching from V7 (Curation as Practice) and Attaching to V11(Practice as Curation)

As discussed above, the Significant Insight of “using Curativity Theory to understand Social Practice” was born from the process of diagramming.

If I stayed there with the above “Practice System” diagram, I couldn’t get the “Practice as Curation” insight. This is what I called “Diagramming as Theorizing”. The creative process of theoretical development is an activity of searching and making new possible creative spaces. If I can insert a space into the “Practice System” diagram, then the Graphical Space refers to a Creative Space of theoretical thinking.

We also should pay attention to the action of renaming. In #TalkThree 02: How to Name “X Innovation”? I used “Example, Meaning, and Name” to introduce the Concept Dynamics framework.

The Concept Dynamics Framework emphasizes that every theoretical concept has three basic aspects: ecological reality, conceptual reality, and linguistic reality.

• Ecological Reality refers to the real experience of discovery in the real world from the perspective of researchers.
• Conceptual Reality refers to the outcome of the creative conceptualization process.
• Linguistic Reality refers to expressional form with verbal and rhetorical effects.

Why did I change the names of some terms, some diagrams, and files? For example, I changed “Action Zone” to “Curatorial Zone”.

In the early stage of any project, especially knowledge discovery, theoretical development, and research, we tend to 1) use code names to describe our rough ideas, and 2) change our ideas and perspectives frequently.

We often face the situation of the mismatch between Conceptual Reality and Linguistic Reality. If we change our mind about an object, it’s better to change the name for describing the object in order to keep the match.

This framework also points out a creative technique for developing new concepts. We can deliberately make the mismatch between Conceptual Reality and Linguistic Reality and take this new challenge as a new opportunity.

In 2018, I deliberately used the “X as Y” technique to guide my creative process.

4.4 The Final Words

From Sept 20, 2018, to Oct 14, 2018, I applied the “X as Y” technique three times and developed the theoretical foundation of Curativity Theory and the 615-page book.

The v11 is an 83-page file. I expanded it to a 615-page draft from Oct 2018 to March 2019. How did I write the book in six months? This is another story.

A by-product of developing Curativity Theory is The Ecological Practice Approach Toolkit which was called the Gibson — Lakoff — Schön approach because I adopted theoretical concepts from James J. Gibson, George Lakoff, and Donald Schön.

After March 2019, I continuously worked on revising Curativity and developing the Ecological Practice Approach as a new project. During May 2020, I wrote another book titled After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for expanding ecological psychology to the modern digital environment.

A major development of the Ecological Practice approach is the concept of Supportance. I have been searching for a concept for expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis for about two years after I finished the draft of Curativity.

It takes about five months to develop the concept of Supportance. The concept of Supportance was born on Oct 27, 2020, after I wrote the Ecological Practice Approach Toolkit on Oct 19, 2020. I had several round private discussions with my friends during the past several months. On Dec 13, 2020, I published the Platform for Development (P4D) Framework (1.0), I applied the concept of Supportance to develop the framework. This is also a test of the concept of Supportance. From Dec 26, 2020, to Feb 3, 2021, I worked on Project-oriented Activity Theory. I returned to the P4D project on Feb 9, 2021. On Mar 12, 2021, I wrote a long article about the concept of Supportance.

The concept of Supportance means the Ecological Practice approach has transformed from a curated toolkit to an original theoretical framework. This is a major milestone of the approach.

During the process of developing the Ecological Practice Approach, I have written three books (drafts).

• Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice
• After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action
• Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century

Each year I write a book and each book establishes an important theoretical concept for the Ecological Practice approach. Curativity introduces the concept of Curativity and develops the toolkit version of the approach. After Affordance introduces the concept of Attachance and develops the germ-cell version of the approach. Platform for Development introduces the concept of Supportance.

Both Curativity and After Affordance were written in Chinese. In fact, they are still unpublished drafts. Curativity is a 615-page Google Doc file while After Affordance is a 371-page file. Platform for Development is written in English.

You can find more details about the story in The Development of Ecological Practice Approach.

Related Articles

• Meet with Oliver Ding: 1 Mission, 4 Theories, and 12 Possible Books
• Curativity Theory: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice
• Curativity Theory: Table of Contents and Related Articles
• Life Curation: The Container, Double R Analysis, and Challenges
• The Knowledge Curation Project
• Knowledge Discovery (Book)
• The Slow Cognition Project
• The Notion of Thematic Spaces
• Slow Cognition: A Meta-canvas for Developing Tacit Knowledge
• The Slow Cognition Project (Phase II): Activity Analysis for Creative Work Study

I am also working on building a new website for the Platform Ecology project. You can save the following links:

• PlatformEcology.org
• Twitter: @PlatformEcology
• Linkedin: @PlatformEcology

You are most welcome to connect via the following social platforms:

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliverding
Twitter: https://twitter.com/oliverding
Polywork: https://www.polywork.com/oliverding
Boardle: https://www.boardle.io/users/oliver-ding