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Activity Analysis Network #21 — One Half-Year, Eight Possible Books

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Activity Analysis Network #21 — One Half-Year, Eight Possible Books
Photo by Li Yang / Unsplash

A Special Edition

by Oliver Ding

July 10, 2026

Hi, and welcome to a special edition of Activity Analysis Network.

The next regular issue is scheduled for July 15, following the usual biweekly rhythm. But today I want to send an off-cycle note — not organized around the usual Flow–Focus–Center–Circle schema, just four things.

1. A Three-Week Pause


I am leaving the US on July 10 and returning on July 30. In between, I'll be in China, traveling with family and visiting relatives.

The daily work of the Activity Analysis Center, and this newsletter, will pause for three weeks. Normal operations resume in August.

2. A New Book: Strategic Developmental Psychology (v2.0)


On July 9, I released a new possible book: Strategic Developmental Psychology: Situation, Gejunction, and Supportive Self-Actualization (SDP v2.0).

The book is organized into seven parts: Theoretical Psychology Revisited, Psychological Knowledge Engagement, Journey and Gejunction, Supportive Self-Actualization, Gejunction, Creative Engagement, and Agency and Mind. The most significant advance in v2.0 is structural: alongside the three irreducible complexities that anchored the earlier v1.2 landscape — Anticipation, Performance, and Relevance — a fourth complexity, Mind–Body, has now entered the framework. This addition is not an afterthought; it is where two previously separate lines of exploration, the Curativity of Mind and an ecological account of strategic cognition, converge with SDP.

The conceptual center of the new manuscript is Gejunction — the Unit of Synthesis within GO Theory. Gejunction weaves the diachronic structure of past–present–future together with the synchronic structure of social relations into a single meeting-point framework, and it gives SDP something it did not fully have before: theoretical independence from ACS. Around Gejunction, the book also gathers several recent developments — RelationField v3.0, Living Coordinate, and the Weave-points — into a coherent whole.

Everything in the book eventually points toward one question: what is this whole apparatus of situations, junctions, anticipatory modeling, and relational support actually for? The answer is Supportive Self-Actualization — across a three-layer architecture of Self (sub-individual, individual, and supra-individual), the ongoing anticipatory activity through which a self, in the company of others, moves from ecological potential toward realized actuality. That is both where the theoretical apparatus of SDP arrives, and where the book itself lands.

3. One Half-Year, Eight Possible Books


Looking back at the first half of 2026, I've now released eight possible books:

A note on what "Possible Book" means. These books are not written for formal commercial publication. They are a medium I use to close out a knowledge project, or to take stock of a knowledge enterprise at a particular stage — each one usually curated from a cluster of already-published articles.

Editing a possible book forces me to switch from a Creativity state to a Curativity state — the two diachronic lines I lay out in the Weave the Theory model itself. (The details are in the book of the same name.)

Most of this half-year's work grew out of the theoretical platform that took shape in the closing chapters of Lake 42 — first named the World of Life (World of Activity) Approach, and now carrying a simpler name: GO Theory.

I'm using a Spatial Heuristics series to trace how GO Theory, as a platform, has supported the development of both ACS and SDP. Two articles so far:

4. Possible Press


Some of these Possible Books are also published on Possible Press. In addition, Possible Press has released far more than just these book-length works, all in service of exploring creative cognition.

Early drafts and preliminary ideas from the development of these projects are published as Thematic Cards, Tiny Papers, Conceptual Decks, and Emerging Studies Collections. By reading these early versions alongside the later books, you can observe the actual process of creative growth in real time.

If you'd like to support this independent, unaffiliated work, you're welcome to purchase the digital publications on Possible Press.

https://possiblepress.net/

Oliver Ding

Founder of the Activity Analysis Center

July 10, 2026

p.s. I'll be in China for the next three weeks — see you again in August.

During my trip to China last year, I wrote extensive notes that later became Homecoming: A Thematic Trip and the World of Activity Approach, a full Kindle book.

I've also published a bilingual edition on Possible Press. You can preview selected parts here:

In Lake 42, I also mentioned the 2025 trip.