Knowledge Discovery: The HERO U Canvas

A Heuristic for Developing Brand New Concepts and Writing Books

This article is part of the Slow Cognition Project which focuses on Developing Tacit Knowledge with Thematic Space Canvas. The Knowledge Discovery Canvas is an application of the Thematic Space Canvas.

The Knowledge Discovery Canvas has two nested squares which divide the thematic space into two sub-spaces: inner space and outer space. For Developing Tacit Knowledge, the inner space is all about personal knowing activities while the outer space is related to social interactions.

Based on the above settings, I generated a series of mapping between outer space and inner space:

• Approaches — Tastes
• Concepts — Notions
• Events — Projects
• Domains — Works
• Perspectives — Views
• Frameworks — Insights
• Methods — Guides
• Heuristics — Skills

Today I’ll focus on the Heirisitcs — Skills mapping and use the HERO U Canvas as an example for our discussion.

Two years ago, I published an article titled HERO U — A New Framework for Knowledge Heroes on June 26, 2020. Two months later, I started testing the HERO framework by writing a series of articles about Activity Theory. I called this project the Activity U project which is considered a knowledge curation project.

Since then, I have been using the HERO U framework to guide my knowledge curation projects. From August 2020 to March 2021, I wrote the following three books:

In April 2021, I wrote a book called The ECHO Way to reflect on the HERO U framework and the process of writing the above three books. In the book, I used one chapter to discuss the HERO U Canvas.

The HERO U Framework

The HERO U Framework is designed for Knowledge Heroes such as scholars, authors, and thinkers who make unique epistemic impacts. The framework uses the structure of “organism (personal conditions of knowing) — action (knowing) — environment(objective of knowing)” as the foundation.

The U shape presents six types of “Objective of Knowing”:

• mTheory: Meta-theory
• sTheory: Specific Theory
• aModel: Abstract Model
• cModel: Concrete Model
• dPractice: Domain Practice
• gPractice: General Practice

There is an assumption behind the typology of “Objective of Knowing”. According Construal level theory (CLT), a social psychology theory that describes the relationship between psychological distance and the extent to which people’s thinking is Abstract or Concrete.

The seven red balls refer to Personal Conditions of Knowing. The first group is Domain, Resource, and Tools, they define the outside setting of the knowing activity. The second group is Method and Problem, they define the source of competence and solution. The third group is Diagram and Concept, they define the representation format of the outcome of knowing. These three groups form a process of knowing.

We have to notice that these personal conditions of knowing are not separate, but intertwined. You can find more details about the HERO U framework in HERO U — A New Framework for Knowledge Heroes.

The Born of the HERO U Canvas

In June 2020, I started the Activity U project which aims to curate the landscape of Activity Theory from different perspectives. On Sept 3, 2020, I published the fourth article of the project:

The article focuses on Finnish educational researcher Yrjö Engeström’s work and reviews his theoretical building from the perspective of diagrams and diagramming. Yrjö Engeström upgraded the activity theory from the individual activity level to the collective activity level with a conceptual model of “activity system” in order to apply activity theory to educational settings, organizational development, and other fields (Engeström,1987).

In 1987, he published his keystone work titled Learning by Expanding (1987/2014) in which he developed the now-famous Activity System triangle, the concept and model of Expansive Learning, and the early version of the methodology of development work research. Since then, his research has significantly advanced our understanding of development and learning in different work settings and made significant contributions to cultural-historical activity theory.

The subtitle of Learning by Expanding is An Activity-theoretical Approach to Developmental Research. Usually, we will consider this work as an application of Activity Theory. There is a theory called Activity Theory, he just applied it to generate a new idea about Developmental Research. Actually, this is not a simple “theory use” work, but an excellent “theory make” case.

Learning of Expanding has five chapters, the following titles of each chapter point out different goals.

• Chapter 1: Introduction
• Chapter 2: The emergence of learning activity as a historical form of human learning
• Chapter 3: The Zone of Proximal Development as the basic category of expansive research
• Chapter 4: The Instruments of Expansion
• Chapter 5: Towards an expansive methodology

In order to develop a model of learning in the work setting, Engeström decided to develop a model of “learning activity”. In order to understand the “learning activity”, he chose to trace back to two lines. One line is about “activity” while another line is about “learning”. During the process, he had to develop a collective level version of “activity theory” for his research. This process is clearly displayed in Chapter 2.

I designed the picture below to visualize Engeström’s thoughts about this process. The picture has seven red dots: Domain, Resource, Tools, Problem, Method, Concept, and Diagram.

At that time, I didn’t intend to design a thing called “the HERO U Canvas”. It just appeared because I want to visualize Engeström’s thoughts about Chapter 2 of his book. Since this article is only about the Activity System Triangle, the above picture only summarizes half of the thoughts behind Chapter 2. I didn’t put the other half which is about “learning” into the picture.

Now we can consider the HERO U Canvas as a by-product of the Activity U project.

The HERO U Canvas for Reflecting

From December 2020 to February 2021, I worked on Project-oriented Activity Theory which is inspired by Andy Blunden’s notion of “Project as a unit of Activity”.

A major development of Activity Theory during the past decade is Andy Blunden’s account “An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity”. Andy Blunden is an independent scholar in Melbourne, Australia. He works with the Independent Social Research Network and the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and has run a Hegel Summer School since 1998.

Blunden’s vision of the interdisciplinary theory of Activity is inspired by Vasily Davydov’s argument:

I always argue that the problem of activity and the concept of activity are interdisciplinary by nature. There should be specified philosophical, sociological, culturological, psychological and physiological aspects here. That is why the issue of activity is not necessarily connected with psychology as a profession. It is connected at present because in the course of our history, activity turned out to be the thing on which our prominent psychologists focused their attention as early as in the Soviet Union days. Things just turned out this way. (Davydov, 1999: 50.)

In order to develop the notion of “Project as a unit of Activity” as a theoretical foundation of the new interdisciplinary theory of Activity, Blunden adopts Hegel’s logic and Vygotsky’s theory about “Unit of Analysis” and “Concept” as theoretical resources. The process is documented in four books: An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (2010), Concepts: A Critical Approach (2012), Collaborative Projects: An Interdisciplinary Study (2014), and Hegel for Social Movements (2019).

In his 2010 book An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity, Blunden traces the roots of Activity Theory from Goethe, Hegel, and Marx in order to present an immanent critique of Activity Theory and its contemporary version CHAT. The core of Blunden argument is a theoretical-methodological issue: Unit of Analysis. For Blunden, the concept of “Unit of Analysis” should be understood as Goethe’s Urphanomen which is also known as the ‘cell’. Blunden believes that the unit of analysis should be followed by an explanatory principle of “the part contains the whole”.

The solution of “Project as a unit of Activity” is summarized in a paragraph at the end of Introduction to Collaborative Projects. Blunden said, “How can we understand the relation between the motivation of individual actions on one hand, and on the other hand, the immanent objective of the project which forms the unifying principle of the project uniting all the disparate individual actions into a single activity? Hegel resolved this problem in his solution to the problem of the subsumption of any number of individual actions under a concept, but there is no criteria other than the concept itself determining this subsumption. The relation between an action and the project which gives to the action its rational meaning is the same as the relation between any individual discursive act and the concept which it instantiates, and the same as the relation between any individual thing and the category under which the thing is subsumed. The relation between the individual and the universal is mediated by the particular, that is by praxis, and it not to be conflated with the subjective-objective relation which is a quite distinct relation. The universal has no separate existence, but exists only in and through its particularization by individuals.”(2014, p.26)

I wrote several articles to introduce Andy Blunden’s ideas and designed a series of diagrams to visualize these ideas. I also expanded his ideas from a general interdisciplinary theory of Activity as a meta-theory to a Project-oriented approach for practical studies.

Eventually, I wrote a new book titled Project-oriented Activity Theory. On Jan 23, 2021, I used the HERO U Canvas to reflect on my thoughts behind the process of writing the book.

The main part of the book is five articles. I considered them as Five Steps. You can find more details on the canvas. My work also produced one brand diagram and two brand concepts.

It was interesting that I didn’t use the HERO U Canvas for my thoughts before starting writing these articles. I just used the canvas to reflect on the process after the work is done.

However, this reflection brings me a new insight: I can use the HERO U Canvas for planning too. While the whole canvas offers a framework for the landscape view, the Five-Step area offers a guide for actual actions.

The HERO U Canvas for Planning

From February 2021 to March 2021, I worked on a new book titled Platform for Development: The Ecology of Adult Development in the 21st Century.

On Dec 13, 2020, I published the Platform-for-Development (P4D) framework (v1.0) which introduced a new unit of analysis: Platform (Project).

The v1.0 didn’t officially adopt the Ecological Practice approach as a theoretical resource for discussing platform ecology. In Feb, I decided to do it. This decision led to the v2.0 of Platform-for-Development. Eventually, the framework expands from the original settings Platform(Project) to a three-level analysis framework: Platform-ba[Project(Zone)]. The new structure is guided by an intermediate framework: Infoniche, a sub-framework of the Ecological Practice approach.

Readers have to notice that the v1.0 was published on Dec 13, 2020, before I started the project of “Project-oriented Activity Theory”. During the process of writing about the theory, I learned more about the approach and developed some new ideas such as Zone of Project and Projectivity.

On Jan 24, I closed the project “Project-oriented Activity Theory (Booklet)”. On Jan 26, I had an email conversation about the Ecological Practice approach and the concept of Supportance with two friends. Thus, these activities inspired me to write an article about the concept of Supportance.

On Feb 9, 2021, I wrote an article titled The Supportive Cycle (v1.0) and used it to apply the concept of Supportance to the unit of analysis: Platform(Project). This article also introduced a new concept called “Platform-ba”.

The concept of “Platform-ba” is part of my thoughts about Platform Ecology. So, I realized that I need to offer readers more details about Platform Ecology. On Feb 14, 2021, I wrote Platform, Platform-ba, and Platform Ecology.

On Feb 18, 2020, I reflected on these articles. At that time, I intended to use the HEUO U Canvas and the Five-Step method to guide my plan of writing a new book.

The above picture is a note about a plan of five steps. The diagram below is the HERO U Canvas for the project.

To be honest, the concepts of “Supportance” and “Infoniche” were born before the project. I just used the book to officially introduce these two concepts to readers.

This strategy is planned for producing the Ecological Practice approach. Each year, I plan to write a new book. Each book intends to introduce at least one theoretical concept of the approach. The mission of the Platform-for-Platform project is to introduce the concept of Supportance.

The final outcome is pretty amazing. I didn’t expect that I can develop a new theory about adult development. See the diagram below.

The above diagram is the outcome of a dialogue between Lev Vygotsky’s concept of “ZPD (Zone of Proximal Development)” and Ecological Psychology. The above diagram represents a new model of adult development from the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach. A person’s development means the transformation between Potential Self and Actual Self, this process is related to the transformation between Supportance (potential action possibility) offered by the social environment and Actual Action.

You can find more details about the above new model here.

The HERO U Canvas for YOU

How to use the HERO U Canvas for your knowledge projects?

As discussed above, the canvas can be used for different purposes at different stages.

It all depends on your creative situation.