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Oliver Ding

Oliver Ding

Founder of CALL (Creative Action Learning Lab), information architect, knowledge curator.

Activity Analysis Network #19: Appropriating Activity Theory, Rebuilding the Living Coordinate, and RelationField

These articles grew out of two main projects, with related articles emerging alongside each.

A Journey of Finding the Coordinate

This article is an excerpt from a chapter of Lake

A Thematic Conversation on Finding the Coordinate

What does a “life operation system” look like? It is a metaphor. When a person uses a metaphor to say something, we need to figure out what the actual meaning the person wants to express behind the metaphor.

RelationField (v3.0): A Model of Social Appropriation

Looking back over this whole chain — Yan Fu's residence, the trip, the photograph, the cover, the postscript, and now this article — I was reminded of a framework I had worked on last November, concerned with the subject–object relation.

SDP: Revisiting the "Belief" Issue from the Self-Life-Mind Perspective

This paper focuses on the Self-Life-Mind (SLM) model. First, we explore how the SLM schema approaches the "belief" issue. Second, we review how the SLM schema operates as a meta-framework, providing the structural principle that ...

Mapping Strategic Moves #5: Ideas, Possible Project, and Actual Project

In this article, we discussed three thematic rooms: Ideas, Possible Project, and Actual Project. If we connect them together, we see a circular path of a strategic journey.

Mapping Strategic Moves #2: Engaging with Activity Theory

This article is part of a possible book Strategic Moves: Mapping Knowledge Engagement and Structural Choice.

Rebuilding the Living Coordinate: A Case Study Summary

About two weeks before writing this article, I noticed that a friend had been sharing a series of articles and materials about a profound transformation in her belief system — what she called "reinstalling her internal operating system."

A Chair from a Hundred Years Ago

The chair sat in Fuzhou through all of it. Now it is on the cover of a book that tries to say something about what that journey means.

Appropriating Activity Theory (Possible Book, 2026)

The "Appropriating Activity Theory" column aims to reflect my creative journey of engaging with Activity Theory from 2015 to 2025. It was started on September 4, 2025.