The Vision of #CALL
My name is Oliver Ding, I am the founder of Creative Action Learning Lab (#CALL).
A boundary innovator
I am a boundary innovator with various experiences in several different fields within a broad range. I was born in China, but now I live in the USA with two sons and my wife. I once worked for Pre IPO-stage enterprises, and now I work for an early-stage small start-up. I once serviced industry clients as a creative copywriter, and now one part of my work is acting as an in-house designer. I once founded, co-founded, and advised a dozen of online nonprofit communities as a digital activist, and now I am running fast on my way toward to a theorist specializing in remixing ecological psychology and practice theory.
I am a creator, curator, and connector. My newest journey is #CALL which stands for Creative Action Learning Lab.
From Content to Action
There are three basic types of creations: Content, Object, and Action. Beyond these basic types, there are some complex mixed types. For example:
- Content: Books, ads, visual design, music, course, news, law, etc.
- Object: Tools, toys, instruments, clothes, vehicles, new materials, etc.
- Action: Dance, sport, party, rituals, process, etc.
- Content/Object: Sculpture, architecture, school, museum, library, aquarium, etc.
- Content/Action: Recipe, rule, guidelines, game, speech, etc.
- Object/Action: Restaurant, park, playground, church, dance hall, shopping mall, ice rink, stadium, etc.
My preference for types of creation has slowly changed from Content to Action during the last several years.
After spending many years in the digital nonprofit community, I changed my attention to theory and research. During the last almost five years, my personal learning journey focused on ecological psychology, practice theories, cognitive science, and the philosophy of science. One of the most important things I want to do is to bridge theory and practice.
Building the Bridge
The “bridge” has two meanings to me. First, I want to bridge my past with my future. There are various miscellaneous work and learning experiences within my past career, after learning some theories, I feel my chaotic experience suddenly become an invaluable asset for my future career. Second, there is a huge opportunity for transformation between scientific knowledge creation and everyday life creation.
Another interesting thing is that two of the theories I learned highly tie to Action. Ecological psychology is about the perception-action loop and Practice Theories are about acts, actions, and activities within everyday life.
Finally, I and my partners recently decided to work on building a brand-new social platform that aims to encourage people to take action.
These threads weaved together and guides me to a new creative space: why not start a learning community about action design, action study, and action theory?
The Born of CALL
Ten days ago, I got the name idea. I can call this creative space #CALL which stands for Creative Action Learning Lab.
#CALL is not only for me. It is not for the project we are working on too.
#CALL is for people who love these three keywords: Creative, Action, and Learning.
One thing I am going to explore with #CALL is Action Patterns. The plan is divided into three sections:
Curate: find, select and collect a collection of action patterns and related stuffs. Create: design, test and apply possible action patterns. Research: study the law, methods and patterns of action patterns.
For example, I coined the new phrase “Initial Moment” which is a possible action pattern that means using something or doing something for the first time. I believe this kind of experience is very unique and important for human learning and social life. It is also critical for user experience design. If you like this phrase, you can use it for sharing your story with the hashtag #InitialMoment.
The second thing I want to explore is Brand Commons or Open Brand Method. I got this insight when I was active within the Chinese TED/TEDx community. In 2008, I cofounded the TEDtoChina project with a friend in China. The project is an independent TED tribute project that uses the TED logo with permission from TED. The purpose of TEDtoChina is about bringing in the rich learning experiences of TED to people who speak Chinese, and help foster local innovations. We give support to TEDx events around the Greater China area. The project later became the hub of the TED Chinese community. This lesson taught me that an open brand program such as TEDx is an innovative method of human collaboration.
The mission of Creative Action Learning Lab (#CALL) is to explore the transformation of possible practices and discover beautiful approaches for building our future together.
