Platform as Infoniche

Introduce the Infoniche framework for understanding the structure of Developmental Platform.

The last article introduced a new concept Developmental Platform for interdisciplinary developmental study. It is defined as a social environment which could strongly support adult development in various ways. I consider it as an intermediate concept which aims to connect theory and practice.

For practice, the Development Platform is the core of the Platform-for-Development framework. For theory, the Development Platform offers a creative space for testing my theoretical project: the Ecological Practice approach.

This article will review several theoretical ideas on the environment of adult development and adopt the Ecological Practice approach for understanding Developmental Platform. In particular, I shall introduce the Infoniche framework to conceptualize the structure of Developmental Platform.

The outcome is a three-level model which includes Zone (micro level), Project (mezzo level), and Platform-ba (macro level). Furthermore, I introduce the Ecological Offer framework for the Zone level analysis. I also review some ideas about Project and Platform-ba from previous articles.

Contents

Part 1 The Environment of Adult Development

1.1 Levinson’s life structure 1.2 Ryan & Deci: Self-Determination Theory 1.3 Ryan & Deci: Embedded Social Context 1.4 Vygotsky: Zone of Proximal Development 1.5 Bronfenbrenner: Bioecological Systems Theory

Part 2 The Ecological Practice Approach to Development

2.1The Ecology of Human Development 2.2 Self, Other and Supportance 2.3 Potential, Actual and Development

Part 3 The Infoniche Framework

3.1 From Gibson’s Niche to Infoniche 3.2 The structure of Infoniche

Part 4 The Structure of Developmental Platform

4.1 Zone and Offer 4.2 Project and Projectivity 4.3 Platform-ba and Platform-ship 4.5 Concept and Theme

Part 5 Summary

Part 1 The Environment of Adult Development

Developmental psychology is a major branch of psychology. There are many established theories of adult development. My focus is not on developing a brand new theory of adult development but on exploring the relationship between environments and people from the perspective of adult development.

Adult developmental theorists and psychologists in general have paid attention to the issue of environments. Instead of taking a systematic literature review, I only select several relevant ideas for our discussion.

1.1 Levinson’s life structure

A well-known adult developmental theorist Daniel J. Levinson mentioned six major issues that must be dealt with by every structural approach to adult development in a 1986 article A Conception of Adult Development. Levinson is most well known for his theory of stage-crisis view and age-graded model. From their studies of both men and women, Levinson and his colleagues suggest that people evolve through an orderly sequence of stable and transitional periods that correlate with chronological age. Levinson uses concepts such as Life Course, Life Cycle, and Individual Life Structure to develop his theory of adult development. According to Levinson,

• “Life course…refers to the concrete character of a life in its evolution from beginning to end…the word course indicates sequence, temporal flow, the need to study a life as it unfolds, over the years. To study the course of a life, one must take account of stability and change, continuity and discontinuity, orderly progression as well as stasis and chaotic fluctuation.”
• “The imagery of ‘cycle’ suggests that there is an underlying order in the human life course…The course of a life is not a simple, continuous process. There are qualitatively different phases or seasons. The metaphor of seasons appears in many contexts. There are seasons in the year. Spring is a time of blossoming, and poets allude to youth as the springtime of the life cycle. Summer is the season of greatest passion and ripeness. An elderly ruler is ‘the lion in winter.’…There is now very little theory, research, or cultural wisdom about adulthood as a season (or seasons) of the life cycle.”
• “The key concept to emerge from my research is the life structure: the underlying pattern or design of a person’s life at a given time. It is the pillar of my conception of adult development. A theory of life structure is a way of conceptualizing answers to a different question: ‘What is my life like now?’…in pondering these questions, we begin to identify those aspects of the external world that have the greatest significance to us…The primary components of a life structure are the person’s relationships with various others in the external world.”

It is clear that Levinson uses a nested structure of time to develop his theory of development: Life Course [Life Cycle (Life Structure)]. This structure connects three different levels of analysis together: macro level (Life Course), meso level (Life Cycle), and micro level (Life Structure).

An interesting fact about life structure is the primary components of life structure. Levinson claims that only one or two components — rarely as many as three — occupy a central place in the structure. He points out, “Most often, marriage — family and occupation are the central components of a person’s life, although wide variations occur in their relative weight and in the importance of other components. The central components are those that have the greatest significance for the self and the evolving life course. They receive the largest share of the individual’s time and energy, and they strongly influence the character of the other components. The peripheral components are easier to change or detach; they involve less investment of self and can be modified with less effect on the fabric of the person’s life.”

Levinson’s discovery echoes common sense: home (marriage — family) and work (occupation). From the perspective of Developmental Platform, we can ask the following questions: What kind of developmental platforms is ideal for supporting activities of marriage-family? What kind of developmental platforms is ideal for supporting activities of occupation? By adopting the concept of “Activity”, we avoid the boundary between Home and Platform, and the boundary between Work and Platform. In other words, we could consider Platforms as a foundational level of social environments.

Levinson also points out six issues of adult development from the perspective of the structural approach: 1) What are the alternative ways of defining a structural stage or period? 2) What relative emphasis is given to the structures and structure-building periods or stages, as compared to the transitional, structure-changing periods? 3) How can we make the best use of the distinction between hierarchical levels and seasons of development? 4) Are there age-linked developmental periods in adulthood? 5) What are the relative merits and limitations of various research methods? 6) How can we bring together the developmental perspective and the socialization perspective?

Issue #6 refers to the direction of interdisciplinary developmental study, at least for connecting psychological research and sociocultural research. According to Levinson, “By and large, psychologists study the development of properties of the person — cognition, morality, ego, attitudes, interests, or psychodynamics…Indeed, a developmental perspective in psychology has traditionally meant the search for a maturationally built-in, epigenetic, preprogrammed sequence.” On the other hand, “The social sciences…look primarily to the sociocultural world for the sources of order in the life course. They show how culturally defined age grades, institutional timetables, and systems of acculturation and socialization shape the sequence of our lives. What we may broadly term the socialization perspective … holds that the timing of life events and the evolution of adult careers in occupation, family, and other institutions is determined chiefly by force in the external world; forces in the individual biology or psyche produce minor variance around the externally determined norms.”

Obviously, here we see a theoretical conflict between two fields: development v.s. socialization. Levinson suggests a balanced approach to the search for order in the life course. He says, “What about the evolution of the life structure? Is it determined primarily from within or from without? Is it a product more of development or of socialization? As I have already indicated, the life structure constitutes a boundary — a mediating zone between personality structure and social structure. It contains aspects of both and governs the transactions between them. The life structure is a pattern of relationships between the self and the world. It has an inner-psychological aspect and an external—social aspect. The universal sequence of periods in the evolution of the life structure has its origins in the psycho-biological properties of the human species, as well as in the general nature of human society at this phase of its evolution (Levinson, 1978, Ch. 20)”.

The Development v.s. Socialization issue is also important for the study of Developmental Platforms. From the perspective of Activity Theory, the issue is also represented as Externalization v.s. Internalization and Individual actions v.s. Collective Activities. As the newest development of Activity Theory, the Project-oriented Activity Theory suggests “Project” as a unit of analysis of Activity. In this way, the Project becomes a great concept for balancing these issues. Readers can find more details about the Project-oriented Activity Theory here.

1.2 Ryan & Deci: Self-Determination Theory

Now let’s move to a general psychological theory of human behavior and personality development: Self-Determination Theory (SDT). There are so many established motivation theories. The reason why I choose SDT for our discussion is that it is particularly concerned with how social-contextual factors support or thwart people’s thriving through the satisfaction of their basic psychological needs for competence, relatedness, and autonomy.

SDT is an empirical humanistic psychological theory. As an empirical approach, SDT is developed with empirical methods such as operational definitions, observational methods, and statistical inferences. As a humanistic approach, SDT rejects the behaviorist perspective of psychology.

According to Richard M. Ryan and Edward L. Deci, “…one can observe the human capacities to be apathetic and alienated, to disconnect from and dehumanize others, and to behave in ways that imply fragmentation and inner division rather than integration. These seemingly contradictory human natures, with capacities for activity and passivity, integrity and fragmentation, caring and cruelty, can be theoretically approached in different ways. As briefly mentioned, one approach, taken by the more behavioristic schools of thought, has assumed that organisms can be conditioned, programmed, or trained to be more ‘positive’ in functioning, or they can be programmed, conditioned, or trained to be more ‘negative.’ In other words, the contradiction is resolved within such theories by assuming a relatively empty or highly plastic organism that is shaped to be either more positive or more negative, with little need to consider the constraints or contents of human nature.” (2017, p.9)

In recent years, we have been seeing a popular discussion about behavior design and the science of persuasion within the design and development of digital platforms. One example of such a discussion is a 2016 article The Scientists Who Make Apps Addictive which was published in The Economist’s 1843 magazine. The beginning of the article introduced B.F. Skinner and the Skinner Box, “In 1930, a psychologist at Harvard University called B.F. Skinner made a box and placed a hungry rat inside it. The box had a lever on one side. As the rat moved about it would accidentally knock the lever and, when it did so, a food pellet would drop into the box. After a rat had been put in the box a few times, it learned to go straight to the lever and press it: the reward reinforced the behaviour. Skinner proposed that the same principle applied to any ‘operant’, rat or man. He called his device the ‘operant conditioning chamber’. It became known as the Skinner box. Skinner was the most prominent exponent of a school of psychology called behaviourism, the premise of which was that human behaviour is best understood as a function of incentives and rewards. Let’s not get distracted by the nebulous and impossible to observe stuff of thoughts and feelings, said the behaviourists, but focus simply on how the operant’s environment shapes what it does. Understand the box and you understand the behaviour. Design the right box and you can control behaviour.”

In a 2018 article titled The 21st Century Skinner Box, the author Ronald E. Robertson points out, “Unlike behavior scientists of the past, engineers and designers working at companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple have enormous sample sizes to draw from, and the nature of digital environments allows them to rapidly adjust their experiments on the fly. The shape and color of the buttons you press, the timing of each notification you receive, and the content of every piece of information that reaches you have often been curated through this data-driven process of mass experimentation. And companies don’t just run these experiments once; they run them but over and over again, storing each stimulus and response, customizing reinforcers and schedules of reinforcement to maximize their influence. Over time, this enables companies to predict, shape, and condition each user’s habits and triggers on a scale previously unimaginable.”

Ryan and Deci consider SDT as an alternative to Behaviorism. They emphasize that the assumption behind SDT is a human nature “which is deeply designed to be active and social and which, when afford a ‘good enough’ (i.e., a basic-need-supportive) environment, will move toward thriving, wellness, and integrity. Yet some of the very features of this adaptive nature also make people vulnerable to being derailed or fragmented when environments are deficient in basic need supports. Social contexts can be basic need-thwarting, with various developmental costs, including certain defensive or compensatory strategies… According to SDT, therefore, our manifest human nature is, to a large degree, experience dependent — its forms of expression are contingent on the conditions of support versus thwarting and satisfaction versus frustration of these basic needs. SDT places human beings, with their active, integrative tendencies, in dialectical relation with ambient social contexts that can either support or thwart those tendencies.” (2017, p.9)

Unlike Behaviorism, the SDT approach accepts both “bad” and “good” environments from the dialectical stance. The concept of Developmental Platform echoes the “good” environment of SDT. In fact, Ryan and Deci give a definition of the “good” environment, “We thus characterize social environments in terms of the extent to which they are: (1) autonomy supportive (versus demanding and controlling); (2) effectance supporting (versus overly challenging, inconsistent, or otherwise discouraging); and (3) relationally supportive (versus impersonal or rejecting). Autonomy support includes affordances of choice and encouragement of self-regulation, competence supports include provisions of structure and positive informational feedback, and relatedness supports include the caring involvement of others.” (2017, p.12)

I have to point out that the basis of SDT is a special view of human needs. SDT theorists claim that there is a core set of psychological needs which are universally essential for optimal human functioning, regardless of developmental epoch or cultural setting. Ryan and Deci point out, “Within SDT, needs are specifically defined as nutrients that are essential for growth, integrity, and well-being…SDT’s three basic psychological needs are those for autonomy, competence, and relatedness.” (2017, p.10) The whole account of SDT is based on these three basic psychological needs.

Ryan and Deci also made a distinction between basic physiological needs and basic psychological needs. The former refers to nutrients required by bodily health and safety, “include such requirements as oxygen, clean water, adequate nutrition, and freedom from physical harms.”(2017, p.10)

This distinction is similar to my distinction between the material aspect and the sociocultural aspect of Platforms. I point out this issue in a previous article The Supportive Cycle (v1.0), “From the perspective of ecological practice approach, the concept of Affordance corresponds to the material aspect of Platform while the concept of Supportance corresponds to the sociocultural aspect of Platform.” However, there is a difference between SDT and my approach. While the SDT only focuses on basic psychological needs, I turn the two aspects and the pair of concepts “Affordance — Supportance” into a potential hierarchical loop.

Ryan and Deci also consider the concept of Awareness as a foundation of autonomous motivation and basic need satisfaction. They point out, “The concept of awareness is seen within SDT as a foundational element for proactively engaging one’s inner and outer worlds, and meeting demands and challenges. Awareness is crucial to eudaimonic living and can facilitate basic need satisfaction and wellness. The concept of awareness in SDT refers to open, relaxed, and interested attention to oneself and to the ambient social and physical environment. Such receptive attention has long been discussed within dynamic approaches to psychotherapy.”

The concept of Awareness is a bridge that connects SDT and my ideas such as the ecological practice approach and the Developmental Platform in particular. My ideas are inspired by James J. Gibson’s ecological psychology. The concept of Supportance is inspired by Gibson’s theory of Affordance. Both Affordance and Supportance refer to potential action possibilities and require people to raise awareness of the ambient physical and social environment. According to Gibson, “Perceivers are not aware of the dimensions of physics. They are aware of the dimensions of the information in the flowing array of stimulation that are relevant to their lives.” (p.293) By perceiving the relevant information, people can perceive affordances and supportances from their environment.

After perceiving and knowing affordances and supportances, people can decide if they want to actualize these action possibilities and take real actions. Thus, this step connects to SDT on motivations and basic psychological needs.

1.3 Ryan & Deci: Embedded Social Context

According to Ryan and Deci, there are two types of social contexts:

• Proximal social contexts
• Pervasive social contexts

Ryan and Deci point out, “…we have focused primarily on the influences of proximal social contexts — for example, families, peer groups, schools, teams, and work organizations — on the individuals’ motivation, development, and wellness. We describe these contexts as ‘proximal’ in the sense that the individuals have direct interpersonal contacts with the people who make up these contexts. As SDT evidence has shown, proximal social contexts have a powerful impact on motivation, behavior, and experience, effects that are strongly mediated by basic psychological need satisfactions and frustrations.” (2017, p.561)

Pervasive social contexts refer to abstract social-cultural systems. According to Ryan and Deci, “Yet proximal social contexts are themselves embedded within broader or more encompassing social systems, both formal and informal, which influence need satisfaction and behavior in myriad ways. These pervasive contexts include the overarching cultural and religious identifications, political structures, and economic systems within which proximal social contexts are constructed and occur (Ryan & Deci, 2011).”(2017, p.562)

Let’s pay attention to examples of proximal social contexts: “families, peer groups, schools, teams, and work organizations.” These are traditional social contexts. It’s hard to apply this typology to the Developmental Platform without adopting other concepts for describing the structure of the developmental platform. From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, I have claimed that there are two types of projects. The first one is understanding it as a “social movement” at the abstract level. The second one is understanding it as a regular work project at the concrete level.

The abstract projects can be considered pervasive social contexts and the concrete projects can be considered proximal social contexts. We should notice that pervasive social contexts don’t always affect people’s behavior indirectly. As Ryan & Deci emphasize, “Pervasive contexts can at times directly affect people’s behaviors and need satisfactions by actively regulating or even blocking their activities…cultural or religious authorities can prohibit or even punish certain lifestyle choices.” (2017, p.562) From the perspective of Project-oriented Activity Theory, there is a concept behind a project. The formulation of a concept has three phases: Initialization, Objectification, and Institutionalization. In the last phase, the project becomes a “social movement”. It is possible there are some cultural authorities behind the institutionalization of a concept. Thus, the project(social movement) is definitely a pervasive social context.

However, in phases of Initialization and Objectification, the project always exists as some concrete projects which are proximal social contexts. Ryan & Deci points out, “Yet the primary influence of these distal contexts is typically more indirect, as pervasive cultural norms or economic structures present ‘invisible’ or implicit values, constraints, and affordances, which are then reflected in more proximal social conditions and conveyed by socializing agents from parents and teachers to cultural messengers such religious leaders, politicians, and celebrities.” (2017, p.562)

The Platform for Development framework is based on the Platform(Project) structure, thus it is perfect to adopt the concept of Project for Developmental Platform. I shall discuss this issue further in the next part.

1.4 Vygotsky’s “Ecological Mind”

Vygotskian scholars don’t use “Ecological Mind” to describe Vygotsky’s ideas. I just use the term to highlight Vygotsky’s three ideas that are highly relevant to ecological approaches of psychology: Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), Perezhivanie, and Social Situation of Development. These three ideas are important for understanding Vygotsky’s thoughts on social context and environment. It is better to consider them as a whole.

According to Andy Blunden, “Perezhivanie is a Russian word, usually translated as ‘a lived experience.’ and used in connection with ‘social situation of development,’ which has multiple shades of meaning. It indicates a person’s situation with special emphasis on the subjective significance, especially the emotional and visceral impact of the situation on the person, recollection of which summons up the entire situation.”

Aaro Toomela also points out the difference between perezhivanie and opyt. He says, “The Russian words perezhivanije and opyt are both translated into English as experience. These two Russian terms, however, refer to psychologically very different phenomena. Perezhivanije is ‘unity of personality and environment . . . Perezhivanije must be understood as an internal relationship of a child as a human being toward this or that moment of reality’ (Vygotsky, 1984b, p. 382). Vygotsky, before becoming a psychologist, studied literature, art, and theater. Several central concepts he used, such as stage and category, can be understood only in the context of theater (Veresov, 2010). The concept perezhivanije belongs to this list; the complex meaning of the term should be related to Stanislavski’s system of training actors (cf. Vygotsky, 1984a). Opyt, in turn, refers to knowledge and skills that develop in the interaction with the environment.”(2014, p.102)

The concept of Perezhivanie is similar to ecological psychology’s ideas on rejecting mind-matter dualism and subject-object dualism. For ecological psychologist Gibson, the concept of Affordance “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.” (1979, p.119). For Cultural-historical psychologist Vygotsky, “…So, in a perezhivanie we are always dealing with an indivisible unity of personal characteristics and situational characteristics, which are represented in the perezhivanie. (Vygotsky, 1934, p. 342)”.

Nikolai Veresov emphasizes the concept of Perezhivanie is related to the principle of refraction. He says, “What is important is that perezhivanie is a tool (concept) for analyzing the influence of sociocultural environment, not on the individual per se, but on the process of development of the individual. In other words, the environment determines the development of the individual through the individual’s perezhivanie of the environment (Vygotsky 1998, p. 294). This approach enlarges the developmental perspective as it introduces the principle of refraction. No particular aspects of the social environment in itself define the development, only aspects refracted through the child’s perezhivanie (Vygotsky 1994, pp.339–340). The perezhivanie of an individual is a kind of psychological prism, which determines the role and influence of the environment on development (Vygotsky 1994, p. 341). The developing individual is always a part of the social situation and the relation of the individual to the environment and the environment to the individual occurs through the perezhivanie of the individual (Vygotsky 1998, p. 294).” (2020)

According to Andy Blunden, “In The Problem of the Environment, Vygotsky illustrates the idea of perezhivanie by the case of three siblings coping or not with their single mother who is a drunk. The infant is indifferent to this situation, being too young to know; the middle child is traumatised; and the oldest child, a teenage boy, understands that he must become ‘the senior man’ in the family, makes an accelerated development and takes responsibility for looking after his siblings and his mother. That is, it is only the adolescent who is able to master the perezhivanie, and even in his case, without outside assistance, his own development may be damaged by his loss of childhood. In this way, Vygotsky showed how not just the social environment, but the significance of features of the environment for the subject and the subject’s capacity to process them, make up the essential units of analysis for understanding the development of the child.” This is the core of Vygotsky’s concept “Social Situation of Development”. This statement also echoes Gibson’s Affordance since it points to both the features of the environment and the subject’s capacity.

The dialectical approach is the foundation of Vygotsky’s thinking. Nikolai Veresov points out, “The principle of refraction shows dialectical relations between significant components of the social environment and developmental outcomes (changes in the structure of higher mental functions). This principle shows how the same social environment affects unique developmental trajectories of different individuals. Vygotsky’s famous example of three children from the same family shows that the same social environment, being differently refracted through perezhivanie of three different children, brought about three different developmental outcomes and individual developmental trajectories (Vygotsky 1994, pp. 339–340). In a certain sense, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the social environment as a source of development of the individual, exists only when the individual participates actively in this environment, by acting, interacting, interpreting, understanding, recreating and redesigning it. An individual’s perezhivanie makes the social situation into the social situation of development.” (2020)

1.5 Bronfenbrenner: Bioecological Systems Theory

The last idea I want to mention is Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory which is original about child development. Bronfenbrenner’s theory defines a five-layer model of the developmental environment. The microsystem refers to a person’s immediate environment which includes home, school, peers, and workplace. The mesosystem focuses on the relationships between these microsystems. For example, the relationship between my workplace and my children’s school forms a mesosystem. The exosystem points to a larger social system which has an effect on the person’s microsystem, however, he or she may not function directly with the layer. The macrosystem is about cultural values, ideologies, and laws that affect other systems.

Bronfenbrenner also considers a system named chronosystem which is related to the timing of historical events. Readers should know the above diagram doesn’t display the layer of chronosystem.

Bronfenbrenner’s approach is highly relevant to the concept of Developmental Platform. However, the concrete model of approach doesn’t directly fix the concept of Developmental Platform. Though the model gives more layers than SDT’s typology of social context, it is still hard to identify an ideal layer for Developmental Platform. Can I place it at the layer of microsystem? It seems it is reasonable to consider Facebook, Twitter, and other digital platforms within microsystem because they are our immediate environment. Can I place these digital platforms at the layer of exosystem? It is also possible to do it because they are also large social systems in which I can’t function directly with them. How can I place one item at two different layers of the developmental environment?

It seems we need a new framework that is not for understanding traditional concepts such as home, school, workplace, mass media, etc, but for understanding digital environments.

Part 2 The Ecological Practice Approach to Development

Readers may know I have been working on the Ecological Practice approach since March 2019 when I finished the draft of Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice. The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology, Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings Theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, and practice theories. There are two goals behind the Ecological Practice approach:

• 1) Expanding Ecological Psychology from the native natural environment to the modern digital environment.
• 2) Expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis.

Originally, the theme of Development is the goal of the Ecological Practice approach. In order to apply it to the Platform-for-Development framework, I start to connect it with developmental thinking. This part will review my newest ideas on the theme of development.

Inspired by Lev Vygotsky and Urie Bronfenbrenner, I conceptualize “Development” as a double transformation between “potential” and “actual”. A person’s development means the transformation between Potential Self and Actual Self, this process is related to the transformation between Supportance (potential) and Action (actual).

2.1 The Ecology of Human Development

Bronfenbrenner’s approach is highly relevant to the concept of Developmental Platform. It offers a solid theoretical foundation for the ecology of human development. According to Bronfenbrenner, “I offer a new theoretical perspective for research in human development. The perspective is new in ties conception of the developing person, of the environment, and especially of the evolving interaction between the two. Thus development is defined in this work as a lasting change in the way in which a person perceives and deals with his environment.”

The most important aspect of the approach is it goes beyond the immediate setting. Bronfenbrenner emphasizes, “The ecological environment is conceived as a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls. At the innermost level is the immediate setting containing the developing person.” Moreover, he points out that what matters for behavior and development is the environment as it is perceived rather than as it may exist in “objective” reality. (1979, pp.3–4)

Here we see three principles that also can be applied to Developmental Platforms:

• Development is related to the relationship between a person and his or her environment.
• The developmental environment is a set of nested structures. The immediate setting is not the only layer of the structure.
• The perceived environment is more important than the objective environment.

I adopt these principles to expand the Ecological Practice approach and use them as a foundation to guide the work of conceptualizing the structure of Developmental Platforms.

2.2 Self, Other and Supportance

Inspired by James J. Gibson’s concept of Affordance, I developed a concept called Supportance which refers to potential action possibility, and it is offered by the social environment.

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.” (1979, p.119)

The affordance concept describes the possibilities for action that the environment including objects and other people offer for a particular person. The theory is complex, according to ecological psychologist Edward S. Reed (1996), there are two ways of using the concept of affordances: concrete analysis of an affordance and abstract analysis of an affordance. The former shows “how particular environment properties can promote a particular species’ habits of life (e.g., how this kind of terrain does or does not support human locomotion).” while the latter shows “these particular relationships between an organism and its habit are instances of ecological regularities or laws.” (p.40)

Inspired by the concept of Affordance, I developed a new concept called Supportance for Platform Ecology in October. In fact, this concept is part of the whole conceptual framework of the Ecological Practice approach. The term Supportance is inspired by Gibson’s writing on the following classical example of Affordance:

If a terrestrial surface is nearly horizontal (instead of slanted), nearly flat (instead of convex or concave), and sufficiently extended (relative to the size of the animal) and if its substance is rigid (relative to the weight of the animal), then the surface affords support.

It is a surface of support, and we call it a substratum, ground, or floor. It is stand-on-able, permitting an upright posture for quadrupeds and bipeds. It is therefore walk-on-able and run-over-able. It is not sink-into-able like a surface of water or a swamp, that is, not for heavy terrestrial animals. Support for water bugs is different.

What Gibson described is an example of Supportive Affordance. He uses this special affordance as an exemplar of the concept of Affordance. While Gibson’s concept of Affordance is for the natural environment, the concept of Supportance focuses on the social environment. Since both Affordance and Supportance refer to potential action possibilities, I consider them as a potential hierarchical loop.

2.3 Potential, Actual, and Development

One idea of Lev Vygotsky’s “ecological mind” is the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). The concept is defined as a space between actual development and potential development.

• Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) : “…the distance between the actual developmental level as determined by independent problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers. (Vygotsky, 1978, p. 86, originally Vygotsky, 1935, p. 42)”

Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer share a story of the development of ZPD in their article Encountering the border. The authors use ZBR (zona blizhaishego razvitia) which is the original Russian of ZPD. They points out, “Around 1931, Vygotsky had reached the theoretical necessity to conceptualize the “making of the future” in human ontogeny (Zaretskii, 2007, 2008, 2009)…The earliest documented mention of ZBR can be found in a lecture in Moscow, at the Epshtein Institute of Experimental Defectology on March, 17, 1933…The third relevant presentation involving the introduction of the ZBR concept took place two months later — when Vygotsky gave a presentation on the development of everyday and ‘scientific’ concepts at Leningrad Pedagogical Institute on May, 20, 1933 (Vygotsky, 1933/1935e)…with in the two-month period (March — May, 1933) Vygotsky was observed to pick up the concept of ZBR and use it actively in different contexts. In all of these uses the concept remained a descriptive one — marking the emphasis on the study of developing (as opposed to already developed) psychological functions. In the final fifteen months of his life, Vygotsky made numerous (but often passing) use of the ZBR concept. The surviving texts of Vygotsky provide us with a potpourri of examples of the use of the ZBR concept. ”

According to Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer (2014), “the idea in ZBR — conceptualizing the processes of emergence of novelty in field terms — has had a recent parallel in the Trajectory Equifinality Model (TEM — Sato, 2009; Sato et al., 2007 2009, 2010, 2012). TEM grows out of the theoretical need of contemporary science to maintain two central features in its analytic scheme — time and (linked with it) the transformation of potentialities into actualities (realization).”

The above diagram represents the Trajectory Equifinality Model. The uniqueness of the model is that it includes both “real” (actual developmental trajectory up to the present) and “ir-real” (possible trajectories that existed in the past and are assumed to exist for the future). Jaan Valsiner and Rene van der Veer said, “TEM thus transcends the preponderance of psychology to include in its schemes only real phenomena, and treats reconstructions and imaginations as equal to the former.”

I consider TEM is a general model of the “Actual — Potential” of individual development. The diagram below is a generalization of ZPD. While the “Teacher-Student” is replaced by “Self — Other”, the “Actual — Develop — Potential” is remained.

From the above diagram, I consider Development can be defined as the transformation between the potential self and the actual self by interacting with others. This notion also echoes the concept of Possible Selves which is developed by Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Nurius.

In 1986, Markus and Nurius published a paper titled Possible Selves to challenge the traditional theories of self-knowledge. According to Markus and Nurius, “Possible selves represent individuals’ ideas of what they might become, what they would like to become, and what they are afraid of becoming, and thus provide a conceptual link between cognition and motivation. Possible selves are the cognitive components of hopes, fears, goals, and threats, and they give the specific self-relevant form, meaning, organization, and direction to these dynamics. Possible selves are important, first, because they function as incentives for future behavior (i.e., they are selves to be approached or avoided) and second, because they provide an evaluative and interpretive context for the current view of self.”

Now we can consider putting self-development and its environment together. Inspired by the above ZPD diagram, I made a new diagram for visualizing the relationship of “Social Environment — Supportance”.

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 the Potential Self and the Actual Self, this process is related to the transformation between Supportance (potential action possibility) offered by the social environment and Actual Action.

Now we have a new theoretical foundation for adult development. The following work is introducing a framework that is based on this foundation.

Part 3: The Infoniche Framework

The above discussion leads to this final part. I shall introduce the Infoniche framework and apply it to develop a model for conceptualizing the structure of Developmental Platform.

3.1 From Gibson’s Niche to Infoniche

Readers may know I have been working on the Ecological Practice approach since March 2019 when I finished the draft of Curativity: The Ecological Approach to Curatorial Practice. The Ecological Practice approach is inspired by James J. Gibson’s Ecological Psychology, Roger Barker’s Behavior Settings Theory, Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Ecology of Human Development, and practice theories. There are two goals behind the Ecological Practice approach:

• 1) Expanding Ecological Psychology from the native natural environment to the modern digital environment.
• 2) Expanding Ecological Psychology from perception-centered psychological analysis to social practice analysis.

In May 2020, I wrote the draft of After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I proposed several new theoretical ideas for the above tasks. I spent one chapter introducing the Infoniche framework. After reviewing Gibson’s idea of Niche, Barker’s idea of Behavior Settings, and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s Bioecological Systems, I coined a new term Infoniche and developed an analytical framework for understanding ecological niches in the information age.

The term “niche” is originally from ecology, Gibson redefines it from the perspective of ecological psychology. According to Gibson, “Ecologists have the concept of a niche. A species of animal is said to utilize or occupy a certain niche in the environment. This is not quite the same as the habitat of the species; a niche refers more to how an animal lives than to where it lives. I suggest that a niche is a set of affordances. The natural environment offers many ways of life, and different animals have different ways of life. The niche implies a kind of animal, and the animal implies a kind of niche. Note the complementarity of the two. But note also that the environment as a whole with its unlimited possibilities existed prior to animals. The physical, chemical, meteorological, and geological conditions of the surface of the earth and the pre-existence of plant life are what make animal life possible. They had to be invariant for animals to evolve.” (1979/2015, pp.120–121)

Following Gibson’s definition of niche, I coined a new term Infoniche which is defined as a set of potential action possibilities such as affordances and supportances. The part of “info” means the new version of niche aims to expand Gibson’s idea into the information age and digital environments. However, I want to claim that Infoniche doesn’t only refer to information environments or digital environments, but to both traditional environments and digital environments. Moreover, the Infoniche framework also expands Gibson’s idea from the natural environment to the social environment by working with the concept of Supportance.

Unlike Roger Barker, Gibson doesn’t develop a systematic analysis framework for his version of niche. Inspired by Barker’s work on the theory of Behavior Settings, I develop a concrete analysis framework for applying the concept of Infoniche to empirical studies.

3.2 The Structure of Infoniche

The Infoniche framework is designed with four dimensions and six levels of analysis. I used three steps to develop this framework.

First, I defined two types of dimensions as settings of infoniche. The first one is Routine Settings which refer to various normal settings of material environments (such as houses, tools, cars, mobile phones, etc), individual habits, and institutional norms. The second one is Cultural Settings which refers to ideologies, cultural themes, mass media, social media content, etc. These two settings provide a concrete context and an abstract context for a person’s life.

Second, I defined two types of dimensions for understanding a person’s life. The first one is Embodied Actions which refer to individual body scale-level actions. The second one is Social Activities which refers to various scales of social activities. The dimension of Embodied Actions corresponds to the analysis of Affordances while the dimension of Social Activities corresponds to the analysis of Supportances.

Third, I defined six levels of analysis based on the four dimensions. For the Routine Settings, I consider as one level of analysis. For Cultural Settings, I pay attention to one idea called Themes of Practice. The most important part is Embodied Actions and Social Activities because they directly connect to Affordances and Supportances. In order to conceptualize an analysis framework, I selected a series of terms for this part:

• Spot: the body scale minimal environment.
• Zone: the one-to-one social interactional space.
• Camp: the small group scale of social space.
• Ba: the large scale of social space.

The term Spot refers to a minimal time-space scale environment which is the container of the body-level immediate situational actions. The term Zone refers to a micro social space that contains the dyad, or two-person system of social interactions. The term Camp refers to a connected group of Zones. The term Ba refers to a large scale of social spaces such as a community, a field, a domain, etc.

Since affordances and supportances can only be perceived from environments, a person has to understand his or her environments in order to improve his or her life by actualizing various affordances and supportances. Based on these levels, the Infoniche framework offers an intervention tool called The Infoniche Checklist. The tool encourages people to reflect on their infoniche based on different levels of environments from three dimensions:

• Exploit (productivity): it is related to normal affordances/supportances.
• Explore (creativity): it is related to novel affordances/supportances.
• Curate (curativity): it is related to the organizing of multiple affordances/supportances.

The chart below lists some examples of questions for practical study and discussion.

Gibson’s niche is a great idea because it points to a way of intervention. However, his research is only about visual perception and psychological theories in general. The Infoniche framework offers a new account that can satisfy the need for explanation-oriented research and intervention-oriented study.

Now let’s apply the Infoniche framework to the Developmental Platform.

Part 4 The Structure of Developmental Platform

As mentioned above, the core of the ecological practice approach to developmental environment is the “affordance — supportance” potential hierarchical loop. If we expand the loop and incorporate the concept of Activity which means a set of actions, then we get the following complex diagram:

The above diagram represents the complex relationship between Affordance, Supportance, and Activity. It is clear that we see two hierarchical loops. First, the Affordance — Supportance loop is located at the potential level. Second, the Action — Activity loop is located at the actual level. Third, The potential hierarchical loop is corresponding to the actual hierarchical loop: Affordance — Action, Supportance — Activity.

Based on this idea and the infoniche framework, I use the following formula to represent the structure of Developmental Platform. The numerator refers to supportance level analysis which is all about social activities. The denominator refers to affordance level analysis which considers the individual body scale intermediate actions.

For the affordance level analysis, I have developed a method called Ecological Physics Method and applied it to the Twitter case study. Readers can find details in this article: #SocialPxD — ReEngagement with Twitterville. In the article, I also mentioned the idea of Spot, “…Third, let’s use Personal Path to talk about ‘move’ within the Stream of Twitterville. A path of Stream is a moving line that crosses several spots. For example, you read your home timeline (spot 1), then click one of hashtags and go to the hashtag page (spot 2), then click one of the users’ icons and go to his profile page (spot 3), then click one item within his profile and go to one of his tweets (spot 4), then click a hyperlink and go to a webpage (spot 5)…This trajectory is your Personal Path. Others can’t copy it.” From these examples I listed, readers can understand the meaning of Spot in digital environments.

Now we can focus on the supportance level analysis. Readers can find Ba and Zone from the above formula. However, readers can also find the term Project at the middle level of the nested structure. The reason is that I find Project-oriented Activity Theory is perfect for discussing the mezzo-level activities of developmental platforms.

I also have developed the Ecological Zone framework for discussing the micro-level activities. In fact, the Ecological Zone framework incorporates Spot, Zone, and Camp together. Thus, the term Zone within the above formula refers to the Ecological Zone framework. Readers can find details in the article Activity U (XI): Process, Position, and Zone of Project.

4.1 Zone and Offer

One important idea I didn’t mention in the previous writings about the Ecological Zone framework is “Offer” which means individual-level supportances. It originally appeared in my book draft After Affordance: The Ecological Approach to Human Action in which I used one chapter to develop this idea as a new theoretical concept for discussing intersubjective action possibilities.

The pair of concepts “Zone — Offer” represents the structure of “natural environment — affordance” and “social environment — supportance”. We can consider “Zone — Offer” as the intersubjective version of “social environment — supportance”.

The above diagram is a simple model of Zone and Offer. If there are continuous interactions between subject A and subject B over time, then we can claim that there is an Ecological Zone that contains A and B. Unlike Roger’s Behavior Settings, the Ecological Zone doesn’t correspond to one particular physical place. The interactions inside an Ecological Zone can happen at various Spots.

In the above diagram, The “Offer” means there is a potential action possibility that is offered by Subject B for Subject A. The “Act” means that subject A takes this offer and responds to subject B.

So far, it looks pretty ordinary. However, I don’t use the word “Offer” as usual. Indeed, I developed a typology of “Offer”. I defined four categories of “Offer”: Self Offer, Tacit Offer, Explicit Offer, and Shared Offer.

The above diagram is a standard model of the Ecological Offer Framework. The most unique type of offer is the Tacit Offer which means this type of potential action possibility is only perceived by Subject A, not directly provided by Subject B with explicit intentions.

4.2 Project and Projectivity

For “Project — Projectivity”, I also developed a typology of projectivity.

First, there is a social/cultural environment that contains Events. By perceiving and knowing Events, people recognize the Primary Projectivity which is offered by the social/cultural environment, and initiate a Project. For the Primary Projectivity, its sense-maker is Events.

Once a project is initiated, it offers Secondary Projectivity for other people to recognize the potential action opportunities of participating in the project. For the Second Projectivity, its sense-maker is the Identity of an established Project.

Third, the participants of a project could perceive and know the Tertiary Projectivity and initiate a new project which is inspired by the project. For Tertiary Projectivity, its sense-maker is the Themes and Identity of an established Project.

Readers can find more details in the article Activity U (X): Projecting, Projectivity, and Cultural Projection.

4.3 Platform-ba and Platform-ship

The Platform-ba is located at the macro level. We can adopt the Supportive cycle model for our discussion. Two weeks ago, I proposed a new model called the Supportive Cycle as a heuristic practical tool for the P4D framework. The model considers four types of entities and four movements of their interactions.

The model considers four types of entities and four movements of their interactions.

The above diagram represents the model of the Supportive Cycle. The four types of entities are Platform, People, Project, and Platform-ba.

So far, we can use the supportive cycle as a way to understand the macro-level potential action possibilities. However, I think there is possible to discover more ways to conceptualize these macro supportances. I consider using a new concept “Platform-ship” as a starting point for further study.

Each type of Platform-ship means a special type of social connection. If we can develop a typology of Platform-ship, then we can get more insights into platform-based social practice.

This is a planned task of the Platform Ecology project.

4.4 Concept and Theme

Finally, there is a term Concept at the center of the Supportive Cycle model. This term is adopted from Project-oriented Activity Theory which considers an activity as a process of formation of a brand new concept. From the perspective of the theory, the term “project” refers to such a process. The P4D framework is inspired by Project-oriented Activity Theory, it would be great to incorporate Concept into the Supportive Cycle since a Concept can be considered as the Curator of the whole activity. By adopting a Concept, the four supportive movements become a meaningful whole process.

The idea of “Concept” also echoes to “Themes of Practice” within the Infoniche framework. I have mentioned this issue in the article Activity U (VIII): Project as a Unit of Activity. Anthropologist Morris Opler (1945) developed theoretical “themes” 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” of social science: “individual — collective.” I consider the notion of “Themes of Practice” as a “process” type of concept, not a “substance” type of concept. Thus, it is not a new category of themes, but a transformational process between individual life themes and collective culture themes. It refers to both concept and action. It connects mind and practice. It indicates the transformation of both person and society.

After reading Blunden’s book Concepts: A Critical Approach which presents a “Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky” account of “Concept”, I realized that Blunden’s argument on Concept echoes my consideration of the concept of Theme. Since Theme is a particular concept, I can adopt Blunden’s proposal — the “Hegel-Marx-Vygotsky” account of “Concept” — as a theoretical foundation to support the concept of “Themes of Practice”.

For the Infoniche framework, the “Themes of Practice” is placed in the dimension of cultural settings. I consider the “Concept — Theme” is part of the Macro-micro connection.

Part 5: Summary

The previous article introduces a new concept Developmental Platform which is defined as an ecological concept for interdisciplinary developmental study.

The term Developmental Platform refers to a social environment that could strongly support adult development in various ways. I consider it as an intermediate concept that aims to connect theory and practice.

After reviewing several theoretical ideas on the environment of adult development, I offer a systematic theoretical framework for understanding Developmental Platform from the perspective of the Ecological Practice approach and Project-oriented Activity Theory.

• Inspired by Lev Vygotsky and Urie Bronfenbrenner, I conceptualize “Development” as a double transformation between “potential” and “actual”. A person’s development means the transformation between Potential Self and Actual Self, this process is related to the transformation between Supportance (potential) and Action (actual).
• Inspired by James J. Gibson’s concept Affordance, I developed a concept called Supportance which refers to potential action possibility, and it is offered by the social environment.
• Inspired by James J. Gibson, Roger Barker, and Urie Bronfenbrenner, I developed the Infoniche framework which suggests a nested structure of environment as containers of Affordances and Supportances.
• Inspired by Andy Blunden, I adopt the concept of Project from Project-oriented Activity Theory.

Based on the above theoretical foundation, I apply the Infoniche framework to conceptualize the structure of Developmental Platform. The outcome is a three-level model which includes Zone (micro level), Project (mezzo level), and Platform-ba (macro level).

Furthermore, I introduce the Ecological Offer framework for the Zone level analysis. I also review some ideas about Project and Platform-ba from previous articles.

Two brand new concepts are “Ecological Offer” and “Platform-ship.” We can discuss these topics in future articles.

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