A Chronicle of Revisiting–Rebuilding Practice (September 2025 – March 2026)
This article is part of Revisiting and Rebuilding: A Strategy for Creative Identity Development (Possible Book, 2026).
by Oliver Ding
March 23, 2026
This chronicle is organized around a single watershed: October 2018. That month marks the moment when sustained theoretical book-writing became the primary creative mode — the transition from a practitioner identity to a theorist identity.
Before October 2018, the creative work was carried out mainly through conceptual decks, practical frameworks, and community engagement. After October 2018, the book manuscript became the dominant medium, and more than forty drafts followed over the subsequent years.
This shift in creative identity is the basis for dividing the archive into two parts: cases where the original material predates the watershed, and cases where it postdates it. The significance of this distinction is not merely chronological. When a present self revisits material created by a past self who inhabited a different creative identity, the RR tension is at its greatest — the distance crossed is not only temporal but identity-level. When the revisiting stays within the same identity phase, the value is different: primarily one of creative heuristics, pattern recognition, and theoretical integration.
The primary sources for this chronicle are the Appropriating Activity Theory (AAT) column articles and the biweekly Activity Analysis Network (AAN) newsletter issues published during this period, along with other related articles. The AAT column was written according to the principles of Creative Life Curation: each article takes a theme, an event, or an object as its organizing center, and traces its development across different periods of time. A single column article may move across multiple years, following a concept or framework through its successive transformations. This means the chronicle below cannot fully capture the richness of each article — what appears here as a single entry often contains layers of detail, digressions, and embedded reflections that the summary necessarily compresses.
In examining these articles, I also discovered a number of nested RR practices — cases where an earlier RR practice had already occurred within the material being revisited, so that the present revisiting is a revisiting of a revisiting. AAT #1 is a clear example: the 2018 engagement with BagTheWeb was itself already an RR practice on the 2010–2012 project, and the 2025 column article revisited that 2018 RR act. AAT #2 shows a similar structure. These nested instances reveal that RR practice does not occur in isolation — it embeds itself into a creative life in a fractal pattern, each act of return potentially becoming the material for a future return. This fractal structure resonates with the pattern of fractal confluence discovered in the Lake 42 manuscript, where streams of development converge, diverge, and reconverge at multiple scales simultaneously.
Part One: The Practitioner's Archive
(Original Materials Before October 2018)
These cases revisit materials from the practitioner phase — a period before theoretical book-writing became the primary mode of work. The original materials were conceptual decks, practical frameworks, community projects, and tools developed in direct engagement with practice. Returning to them from the standpoint of 2025–2026 crosses a significant identity threshold: the person who created these materials and the person revisiting them inhabit different creative identities. The RR tension is at its highest here.
P1-1 — AAT #8 — The Mind as Play Framework (original: mid-2016)
Published: December 31, 2025
In mid-2016, a visit to Children's Museum Houston with two sons produced an unexpected insight: mind as a process of play, and perspective as distinct from reality. This became the Mind as Play framework, completed at the end of 2016 — the seed of a personal epistemological framework that would develop through 2017 into the integrated "Mind, Meaning, and Experience" diagram curating four theoretical perspectives. Revisiting in December 2025 traced five projects across eight years — The Mind as Play (2016), Mind, Meaning, and Experience (2017), D as Diagramming (2021), Life(Self) (2023), and History [Life(Self)] (2024) — unified as a single thematic thread: "Psychological Knowledge Engagement." Eight years of dispersed work became a coherent developmental arc.
P1-2 — AAT #7 — The Piano House and Activity as Container (original: September 2017)
Published: December 15, 2025
On August 26, 2017, an afternoon in the waiting room of a piano school — watching a son play an emergent game with a LEGO transformer — generated a 242-slide conceptual deck: Activity as Container. The deck introduced the Thing-People Relation model, which became the seed of the Activity Circle Model. Revisiting in December 2025 produced a new Weave diagram connecting the Product/By-product idea to the deck's core insight, adding the framework to the Weave-the-Life Framework (v2.0). The Piano House story was recovered as the origin point of a major theoretical lineage.
P1-3 — AAT #1 — The BagTheWeb Project and The Curating Activity System (original: 2010–2012, rebuilt: April 2018)
Published: September 4, 2025
This case contains a nested RR structure. In April 2018, an earlier RR practice had already occurred: BagTheWeb — a web content curation tool developed between 2010 and 2012 — was revisited through the lens of Activity Theory, producing the Curating Activity System. Then in September 2025, that 2018 RR practice was itself revisited: the productive misunderstanding of a core Activity Theory concept was now legible as a creative strategy rather than a failure, and 2018 was situated as the pivot year when one mode of working was about to give way to another.
P1-4 — AAT #5 — The Ecological Zone Framework (original: April 2018)
Published: November 14, 2025
In April 2018, the first well-developed theoretical model of intersubjective interaction from an ecological perspective was completed: the Ecological Zone Framework, illustrated through three children on a family trip. Revisiting in November 2025 repositioned the framework as an early bridge between Ecological Psychology and Activity Theory, noting its resonance with the research of Cole and Barker on children — a connection that had not been visible at the time of creation.
P1-5 — AAT #10 — The LARGE Method (original: December 2018)
Published: January 30, 2026
On December 6, 2018, a spontaneous creative insight produced a six-keyword framework sent via email: Learn, Action, Reflect, Generate, Explore, Exploit — the LARGE Method, designed to elevate the Learning and Reflection project that had been running since 2015. Though formally dated after October 2018, the LARGE Method belongs in spirit to the practitioner phase: it was the accumulated synthesis of three years of practice-based learning, deeply influenced by Donald Schön and Chris Argyris, and completed before the sustained theoretical book-writing mode had taken hold. Revisiting in January 2026 revealed it had evolved into the governing principle for the entire family of methods, reconstructed as L(A·R·G)=E. This issue also published the first two formal RR case studies (Mindentity and LARGE Method) and explicitly named the Revisiting–Rebuilding pattern as belonging to the broader theme of Re-engagement.
P1-6 — RR Case Study — Revisiting and Rebuilding: The Mindentity Concept (original: August 2017)
Completed: January 25, 2026
The Mindentity concept had been introduced in August 2017, in a 72-slide conceptual deck, as an organizational form for understanding talent ecosystems from a developmental-resource perspective. In 2018, through an email exchange, it underwent a fundamental ontological shift: from an economic concept to an ontological framework, distinguishing between the Legal Level and the Psychological Level of identity. Then dormancy — nearly eight years — before re-engagement in January 2026, when it was strategically integrated into the Anticipatory Cultural Sociology (ACS) framework within the "Culture as Thematic Enterprise" model. This was the first formal RR case study: not only an act of Revisiting and Rebuilding, but an analysis of the RR pattern itself — identifying its stages, naming its structure, and inaugurating the AA cycle of Advancing and Analyzing simultaneously.
P1-7 — RR Case Study — Learning Landscape: Revisiting from the World of Life Perspective (original: 2015–2016)
Completed: March 4, 2026
The Learning Landscape framework had been developed in 2015–2016 in the context of work as an advisor to a Chinese youth education company — a practical instrument for understanding different modes of learning, written in Chinese as an internal document. Revisiting it on March 4, 2026, its four perspectives were aligned with the four boundaries of the World of Life — revealing that a framework assembled empirically in 2015 had theoretical necessity all along. Ten years between the original work and the theoretical grounding that finally named it. The rebuilding also supplied the missing first level of the L3D model, completing the four-layer structure Learn → Discover → Design → Deliver in a single working session.
P1-8 — RR Case Study — Revisiting and Rebuilding: The Significant Themes Framework (original: 2015)
Completed: March 5, 2026
From the same 2015 Chinese conceptual deck that had yielded the Learning Landscape, a different component was extracted the following day: three slides listing eight key themes of personal development. These were rebuilt into the Significant Themes Framework, applying Weave the System analysis and Ecological Formism positioning across nine Word documents. Same dormant source, two consecutive days, two entirely different types of Rebuilding — one producing a theoretical framework aligned with the World of Life, the other producing a structured map of personal developmental themes spanning eleven years. Together, these two cases from the same 2015 deck made visible the figure of the past self who had created it: a person embedded in youth education communities, working in a different medium and vocabulary, whose intuitions carried seeds that only became nameable a decade later.
Part Two: The Theorist's Archive
(Original Materials After October 2018)
These cases revisit materials from the theorist phase — the period from late 2018 onward, when sustained theoretical book-writing became the primary creative mode. The RR practice here operates within a single identity phase: the person revisiting and the person who created the original materials share the same fundamental creative identity, even as they occupy different levels of theoretical development. The value is primarily one of creative heuristics — recognizing patterns, naming what had been unnamed, and integrating dispersed work into coherent structures.
P2-1 — AAT #4 — The ECHO Journey: When X Meets Y (original: August 2019)
Written: April 2025, Published in AAT: October 31, 2025
In August 2019, reading papers on the Garrison-Miettinen debate about dualism in Activity Theory inspired the creation of the WXMY diagram — one of the most generative tools in the entire conceptual toolkit. This case was first formally analyzed in April 2025 as part of the Creative Life Curation method, producing the long article The ECHO Journey (2019–2021). The WXMY diagram's genealogy was reconstructed as a three-year journey connecting theory and practice.
P2-2 — Rethinking Social Design: Revisiting Social Engagement Theory (original: July 2019)
Published: November 20, 2025
In July 2019, a theoretical project called Rethinking Social Design produced the SET (Social Engagement Theory) framework — a 159-slide conceptual deck written in Chinese, developed from engagement with Activity Theory and Ecological Psychology during work on one-to-one social interaction platforms. The deck was shared with a few friends but never publicly released. In November 2025, prompted by friends working in fields centered on one-on-one social interaction, the SET framework was revisited and publicly released as a bilingual package on Possible Press, accompanied by four companion documents generated through Google Notebook LM to make the framework accessible to English readers.
P2-3 — AAT #2 — The Project Engagement System (original: November 2020)
Published: September 25, 2025
In November 2020, a revisiting of early career CIS (Corporate Identity System) practice — through the lens of Hegel's theory of concepts as traced by Andy Blunden — produced the Project Identity System, later expanded into the Project Engagement System. This was itself an early RR practice: practical knowledge from an earlier career phase was reframed as the lived precursor to Project-oriented Activity Theory. Revisiting in September 2025 situated this double movement within the longer arc of the Life-as-Activity approach.
P2-4 — AAT #13 — The Hierarchy of Human Activity (original: 2020)
Published: March 14, 2026
Returned to a 2020 article on the Universal Hierarchy of Human Activity — an article that had reached beyond what Activity Theory normally handles, into territory the tradition had deliberately left to one side. At the time, no name existed for what was being done. Now, with Agency Frontier developed, the 2020 article is legible as an early instance of working at structural limits. The 2020 article is recovered as the origin of the Agency Frontier concept.
P2-5 — AAT #9 — The ECHO Way (original: 2021)
Published: January 13, 2026
This revisiting had an unusual trigger: an email exchange with a friend who is an education researcher, whose mention of Donald Schön's "high ground" and "swamp" prompted a return to the 2021 manuscript The ECHO Way: When Theory Meets Practice. The private exchange was intense and generative — dimensions that did not appear in the published column. The ECHO Framework — for navigating the theory-practice gap — was now readable at a new level of social complexity, expanded through the Cultural Projection Model, connecting individual cognitive moves to the social ecology of practice. This issue also marked the explicit naming of the RR pattern: "The once singular Re-engagement movement has expanded into a series of flows."
P2-6 — The Ap-Re-Pro-Co Framework v2.0 (original: 2021)
Published: November 4, 2025
In 2021, the Ecological Relevance Model had established a framework for understanding types of relevance in ecological context. Revisiting it in October 2025, while developing a model of the Subject–Object relation starting from Reed's concept of Social Appropriation, revealed a missing type: Collaborative Relevance at the proximal level. This insight, combined with the Weave basic form and the prefixes ap-, re-, and co- as structural organizers, produced the Ap-Re-Pro-Co Framework (v2.0) — a six-thematic-space model of the Subject–Object relation across spatial and temporal dimensions.
P2-7 — The Weave-the-Life Framework v2.0 (original: 2022)
Published: October 14, 2025
The Life-History Topology had been introduced in 2022, but the details of how Activity as Project Engagement unfolded into it had not been fully explored. Revisiting the Weave-the-Life Model in October 2025, and applying two synchronic and two diachronic dimensions, produced the Weave-the-Life Framework Family: Weave-the-System, Weave-the-Project, and Weave-the-Case — a nested structure offering a scalable way to connect the meso and micro levels of activity, clarifying the previously missing details of the Life-History Topology.
P2-8 — AAT #3 — The Means–End Spectrum and the World of Activity (original: October–November 2022)
Published: October 12, 2025
On October 27, 2022, a revision of the Means–End Spectrum produced the Diagramming Reference Frame. On November 11, 2022, a further diagram — Universal Reference — led to two major outcomes: the notion of "World of Activity" and the Knowledge Engagement Framework. At the time, this felt like an unremarkable diagram exercise. Revisiting in October 2025 revealed it as a milestone: the World of Activity model is now a core foundation of the entire theoretical system.
P2-9 — AAT #12 — Agency Resonance Behind the Project Network (original: 2022)
Published: February 28, 2026
Returned to 2022 — a year in which the SSL program, the AAS Board, and the Slow Cognition Project were running simultaneously, generating what could now be named as Agency Resonance: multiple activity circles activating and triggering each other, producing emergent insights that none of the individual projects would have generated alone. The April 2022 capture of twelve Significant Insights, and the July 7 diagram, were now legible as the moment the resonance became conscious. The 2022 project cluster is reframed as a prototype of the Agency Resonance pattern.
P2-10 — The Curativity of Mind (original: 2019–2022)
Published: December 12, 2025
The "Perception — Action — Conception — Curation" schema had been developed in 2019 as part of Curativity Theory, and the Curativity of Mind model had evolved through work on the Context of Developing Tacit Knowledge (2022). Revisiting both in late 2025, through a creative dialogue triggered by the Weave basic form, revealed the limitations of the four-level structure in the earlier model. Rebuilding produced the "Function — Context — Knowledge — Activity" schema (2025) — a practical framework for Creative Life Theory (v3.0) that positions Curation as both a fourth foundation of mind and a meta-function synthesizing perception, conception, and action.
P2-11 — The Weave-the-Mind Framework (original: 2022)
Published: October 27, 2025
The Curativity of Mind model, which had evolved from earlier work on the Context of Developing Tacit Knowledge (2022), became the starting point for a new creative dialogue in October 2025. Connecting it with the Weave basic form revealed the limitations of its four-level structure and opened new possibilities for representing the complexity of mental moves. Rebuilding produced the Weave-the-Mind Framework (v2.0): three Weave diagrams representing different mental activities, forming a toolkit together with the original Curativity of Mind model.
P2-12 — The Weave-the-Narrative Framework (original: 2021–2025)
Published: November 3, 2025
The Hermeneutics of Creative Life (2023), the Ecological Relevance Model (2021), and the Narrative Curation Framework (January 2025) were revisited in October 2025, when connecting the Weave basic form with the "Narrative Curation" annual theme opened a new line of development. The Weave-the-Narrative Framework (October 29, 2025) generated four weave-points — Transactional, Interpersonal, Particular, and Universal Relevance — and produced a new concept of Narrative Relevance, integrating Hegel's Individual–Particular–Universal schema with Ricoeur's distinction between the Write-Read and Listen-Speak situations.
P2-13 — AAT #11 — Four Moments at the Boundary (original: Fall 2023)
Published: February 15, 2026
For several years, Saturday mornings at a local Chinese weekend school — waiting while two sons attended classes — had been generating quiet observations. In Fall 2023, this became an informal empirical research site for Activity Theory. Four puzzling moments — a math class, a lunch dish, a research project, an invisible course — were now legible through the concept of Agency Threshold, only named in January 2026. The school observations are retrospectively recognized as early empirical instances of the Agency Threshold pattern.
P2-14 — The Ecological Formism Framework v2.0 (original: December 2023)
Published: November 7, 2025
The Ecological Formism Framework had been developing since December 2023, expanding from five to twelve units of analysis across six iterations through v1.2++ by late October 2025. Revisiting the accumulated development in November 2025 produced v2.0 — applying the "Variant — Quasi-invariant — Invariant — Invariant Set" schema systematically across all twelve units, transforming a growing collection of frameworks into a coherent meta-framework of meta-frameworks and completing the core achievement of the Social Moves project initiated in 2023.
P2-15 — AAT #6 — Engaging with Andy Blunden's Creative Ideas (original: 2020–2025)
Published: November 30, 2025
Returned to the arc of engagement with Andy Blunden's work from 2020 to 2025, culminating in the discovery — while preparing learning materials for a new Fellow member in June 2024 — that three book manuscripts formed a trilogy whose chronological order of completion was the exact reverse of the actual creative journey. The "Double Trajectories of Concept Development" pattern is named and theorized. Written on November 30, 2025, while working on Developmental Projects, the article reflects on how concepts do not stop developing when we write about them.
P2-16 — The Developmental Projects Book (original: 2021)
Published: November 30, 2025
The "Outside — Projecting — Inside" triad, first developed in 2021 as a basic ecological form expanding the internalization–externalization principle of Activity Theory, was revisited in November 2025 while editing a new book draft. The triad and the early Cultural Projection Model were rebuilt into the Cultural Projection Model (2025) — a comprehensive framework connecting Mental Platforms and Cultural Frameworks via the Projecting mechanism and Developmental Projects, integrating ideas developed across four years of the Project Engagement Approach into a unified structure for the English manuscript of v3.1.
P2-17 — The History{Life[Self(Body)]} Framework v3.0 (original: 2022–2024)
Published: December 19, 2025
The HLS framework and the AAS framework had been developing since 2022 in dialogue with Robert Rosen's Anticipatory System Theory and Ping-keung Lui's Theoretical Sociology. Revisiting both in December 2025 revealed a connection that had not yet been made explicit: the HLS framework's nested AAS structure gave rise to the Double Anticipation principle, operating at micro and macro levels simultaneously. Rebuilding produced the HLS framework (v3.0), the Weave-the-Culture Framework, and the World of Life Toolkit — a set of six frameworks offering a way to zoom in on the details of the social world while connecting micro-AAS and macro-AAS, and marking a strategic pivot from Individual Life Development to Cultural Life Development.
P2-18 — The "Appropriating Activity Theory" Column (original: 2015–2022)
Published: September 29, 2025
A book draft edited at the end of 2023 — Appropriating Activity Theory: A Journey of Knowledge Engagement — was revisited in September 2025 and reframed as the starting point for a new column on the ActivityAnalysis Center website. The subtitle was changed to A Decade of Engaging with a Century-Old Tradition, and the column was structured in two stages: first sharing detailed stories, then editing them into a book. This reframing is itself a large-scale RR act: a decade of engagement with Activity Theory, now being returned to and rebuilt as a public narrative.
P2-19 — Being by Doing: Creative Life Theory v3.0 (original: 2023)
Published: September 29, 2025
Creative Life Theory (v2.0), edited in 2023, was revisited in September 2025 and rebuilt as v3.0 — expanding from a specific theory to a general theory, introducing the Self-Life-Mind schema as a new meta-framework, and developing the World of Activity from a unit of analysis into an independent concept. The new book draft, Being by Doing: World of Activity and Creative Life Theory (v3.0), curates the creative journey and the landscape of the updated theory around the central question: how does a person achieve a creative life and creative development?
P2-20 — The Design Langue Research Project (original: 2019)
Published: October 14, 2025
The Product Langue framework, originally developed in 2019 as a tool for understanding product design through a linguistic lens, was revisited on October 13, 2025, during a LinkedIn discussion about Strategic Design. The recognition that the same framework could be applied to study "Design" itself — rather than a specific product — produced the Design Langue research project: a spontaneous application of a past tool to a new domain, generating a thematic card as its first output.
P2-21 — The Creative Life Coordinate (original: 2023)
Published: October 22, 2025
The Life Coordinate Framework (v2, 2023) — a sub-framework of the World of Activity Toolkit, which had itself been developed by revisiting the Lifesystem Framework (v1.0) — was revisited in October 2025 to integrate a series of new ideas developed over the preceding weeks. Rebuilding produced the Creative Life Coordinate framework, incorporating the Self-Us-Awe schema, the Enterprise Development Framework, and the concept of Meta-Attachance — transforming the framework from an individual-centered model into a bio-social-nature perspective that marks a new stage of Attachance Theory.
P2-22 — Field Curation (original: 2019)
Published: November 18, 2025
Curativity Theory, developed in 2019 as a framework for understanding curation as a general practice, was revisited in November 2025 and applied to the level of "field" — a broader context than the individual or project level the theory had previously addressed. The result was the Field Curation thematic card: Pieces, Container, Platform, and Network — extending the reach of Curativity Theory into collective and institutional contexts.
P2-23 — Mental Platform Theory (original: 2018–2023)
Published: December 14, 2025
The "Curated Mind" research plan, first sketched in September 2018 as a theory-based reflection on BagTheWeb inspired by Daniel Levitin's The Organized Mind, had been set aside when the Curativity project shifted toward Ecological Psychology. A series of subsequent knowledge projects — the Knowledge Discovery Canvas (2022), the Slow Cognition Project (2022), the Mental Moves Project (2023), the Mental Platform Project (2023–2025) — had been developing related ideas in parallel. Revisiting this whole arc in December 2025 produced Mental Platform Theory: a framework for building Mental Platforms through the Self-referential Strategy, connecting the accumulated insights of five years of dispersed work into a coherent developmental narrative.
P2-24 — Lake 42 (original: 2019–2025)
Published: January 2, 2026
On January 1, 2026, walking around a lake near home, the journey of writing and curating more than 42 possible books between 2019 and 2025 was revisited as a whole. The lake became an ecological metaphor: not a destination but a point of convergence, a site where streams arrive and become something more than the sum of their courses. Rebuilding produced the Lake 42 thematic card and accompanying brief — narrating the story behind six years of creative work and documenting the Generative Confluence journey of the preceding six months as eight movements.
P2-25 — The Anticipatory Cultural Sociology Project (original: April 2023)
Published: January 5, 2026
A note written in April 2023 while reading Ping-keung Lui's Gaze, Actions, and the Social World — exploring the potential of anticipatory sociology in connection with the Knowledge Engagement and Creative Life Theory projects — was revisited on January 4, 2026. What had appeared as an early speculation was now legible as an anticipation of the entire preceding six months of creative work. Rebuilding produced a new diagram curating the HLS Framework (v3.0) and related frameworks into the landscape of a new thematic enterprise: Anticipatory Cultural Sociology.
v1.0 - April 14, 2026 - 4,267 words