A New Possible Book: Knowledge Engagement

Knowledge Center and Creative Life Theory

Yesterday I sent an email to Mr. Ping-keung Lui who is a theoretical sociologist. The email is the last piece of notes I wrote about his book Gaze, Actions, and the Social World.

I also designed the above cover image in order to turn my notes into a possible book and close the project.

How many notes did I write?

15 notes. Total 228 pages.

The outcome is amazing! I reflected on the following three projects while replaying Lui’s theory development journey.

• The Knowledge Engagement Project
• The Creative Life Framework
• The Theme of “Value Circle”

I also developed several new frameworks which form the Creative Life Theory (v2.0), see the above diagram.

This article aims to share more details about the reading project.

A Passion Project about “Theoretical Sociology”

One year ago, I contacted Ping-keung Lui who is a theoretical sociologist.

Ping-keung Lui aims to build a brand new theoretical sociology as a candidate for the paradigm of sociology. According to Lui, “There are three kinds of theories in sociology, namely, social theory, sociological theory, and theoretical sociology. ”

During the process of reading his book The Scientific Project of Sociology (Ping-keung Lui, 2010), I asked myself a question:

Is Activity Theory a sociological theory?

This question led to a series of discussions between Lui and me. In Oct 2022, I adopted Lui’s approach to curating four frameworks into a new meaningful whole: a theory of creative life.

In Dec 2022, Lui mailed a book titled Gaze, Actions, and the Social World to me. In the past four months, I read the book and wrote some short notes. Eventually, I started writing long notes and sent them to Lui.

After sending about three notes to Lui, I realized that I can run a passion project with the theme “Re-Engagement”.

The idea of Re-Engagement is not new. We all have experiences of remembering someone, someday, someplace. On March 1, 2017, my son wore mismatched socks in order to celebrate Dr. Seuss’ birthday. However, I want to use the concept of Re-Engagement to highlight the creative potential between personal memory such as my son’s birthday, and collective memory such as Dr. Seuss’ birthday.

Once upon a great experience. No matter how big or small the experience is, we could re-engage with it.

We can also find the theme of Re-Engagement from knowledge activities. For example, see the picture below.

The 2019 book Perception as Information Detection: Reflections on Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception is the outcome of a “Re-Engagement” project.

Ecological psychologist James J. Gibson published his landmark volume The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception in 1979. The 2019 book is authored by 16 ecological psychologists with a special form that provides a chapter-by-chapter update to and reflection on the 16 chapters in Gibson’s original volume.

Gaze, Actions and the Social World was published in 2007. Now I am writing notes chapter by chapter. This idea turned my normal notes into a passion project.

Yesterday, I sent the last note to Lui and closed the passion project.

How many notes did I write?

15 notes. Total 228 pages.

The outcome is amazing! I reflected on the following three projects while I was replaying Lui’s journey of developing his theory.

• The Knowledge Engagement Project
• The Creative Life Framework
• The Theme of “Value Circle”

I also developed several new frameworks which form the Creative Life Theory (v2.0).

Creative Life Theory (v2.0)

The Creative Life Theory (v1.0) was represented with the following semiotic system diagram.

This time I didn’t use the Semiotic System Diagram technique. I used the Diagram Blending technique to curate three frameworks into a new meaningful whole. The outcome is the diagram below.

If you want to know more about Diagram Blending, see the links below:

• Diagram Blending: Building Diagram Networks (Introduction)
• Diagram Blending: Building Diagram Networks (Table of Contents)

The above diagram is a sign of the new framework which refers to three sub-frameworks. We can use a diagram network to represent it.

The World of Activity for Knowledge Engagement

The Square refers to the World of Activity for Knowledge Engagement.

My primary interest is located in the intersection between Knowledge, Creativity, and Adult Development. I roughly use Creative Life to name this focus.

It’s clear that I don’t want to develop a general framework about adult development for everyone. I only consider Knowledge Workers and Creators as my target audience.

You can find more details about “The World of Activity” in Lifescope: The World of Activity for Creative Life Curation.

Knowledge Center

The Circle refers to “Knowledge Center” which is the container of Knowledge Engagement. You can find more details in TALE: A Possible Theme called “Knowledge Center”.

The above diagram is the basic model of the Development of Ecological Practice Approach.

We can also see a life project as a container too. In this way, we can also use the Project Engagement approach and its application: the Life-as-Project framework.

The root of the Project Engagement approach is Project-oriented Activity Theory which is a new approach to Activity Theory because it considers the following two ideas:

• Project as a unit of analysis of Activity Theory
• Activity as a project of formation of a concept

The field of Activity Theory has many theoretical approaches, the major difference between these approaches is their units of analysis. Some approaches use “Activity System” as a unit of analysis. Project-oriented Activity Theory uses “Project” as its unit of analysis.

For the Creative Life theory (v2.0) and the Knowledge Engagement project, a “Knowledge Center” is a Collaborative Project too.

The S-T-O Tendency

Finally, the Sandglass refers to the S-T-O Tendency. See the diagram below.

I use the S-T-O Tendency to highlight three keywords of the above framework:

• Subjectification: turning the world into a person’s experience
• Crystallize Thematically: discovering a match between individual life themes and collective cultural themes.
• Objectification: turning the person’s experience into artifacts for the world

You can find more details in Slow Cognition: The Creative Life Curation Framework.