Personal Project on Strategic Exploration: Thinking differently requires doing things differently

No rocket science behind that statement.

Common case of Pareidolia (Wiki: Tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none)

Following up on a discussion with

Oliver Ding

, and given that it’s still January 2023, I’ve decided to take on the challenge to map my knowledge themes for the year ahead and discover the nature of my learning experience.

The challenge posed by Oliver was deceptively simple:

“If you only can pick two knowledge themes for 2023, one is for existing theme, the other one is a brand new theme. What should you pick?”

Frankly, I had no answer. Picking a knowledge theme that would convince me to commit seemed restraining. What if something better shows up?

Thanks to Oliver’s next nudge: https://medium.com/the-art-of-bagging/annual-themes-942be39b6d1f

I had a starting point:

The Path of Creative Live (Oliver Ding, 2021)

Oliver’s multi-level diagram covers an encompassing approach to learning and integrating knowledge. The elements in the diagram are intuitive to knowledge acquisition, but they are not always made explicit in the usual learning environments (school, university, online learning platforms, etc.).

It’s quite uncommon to focus on meta-learning. Still, tackling complexity is necessary, so I will make this my secondary knowledge theme and adjust it to my context and needs.

While Meta-learning is not necessarily a brand new theme, done in this manner — active diagramming and tracking its development via these posts — confers a new experience (I’ll thank Oliver for serving as an inspiration). So here’s my diagram and my reflection on it:

I decided to try it because it might prove useful in exposing the soft spots of learning challenges: getting stuck, avoidant, distracted, etc. And it creates the potential for the emergence of new skills (on the left) and new ways of failing (on the right).

Now, I started with the secondary theme (solving the most difficult problem first). The experience of Feeling Connected flows from the second theme into the primary theme and serves as a bridge for knowledge transfers.

The reason is to de-clutter the knowledge space to make room for the primary theme: Creation.

Creation has two sub-themes:

Expression and Connection

I will explain in the next posts their significance and my reasons for framing the knowledge themes like this.

I’m expecting the writing style and rhythm will fluctuate significantly…

I also thank the Design and Critical Thinking Community for inspiring my learning path. I will continue to count on its members for the support!