D as Diagramming: The Creative Work Canvas

How to design a canvas with a diagram?

This article is part of the D as Diagramming project which aims to explore the power of diagrams and diagramming. The previous article talked about diagram blending and canvas. I mentioned three ways of designing a canvas:

• Directly design spaces for concepts without a diagram.
• Expand a diagram into a canvas.
• Generate a canvas by adopting a meta-canvas.

This article will try the second way again. The goal of the challenge is designing a new canvas for Creative Work which is a special type of activity. I will use the Creative Work canvas as a container to curate several frameworks and concepts from my previous work.

• Part 1 reviews the historical development of the concept of Creative Work. You can skip this part and directly jump to Part 2 or Part 3.
• Part 2 discusses the relationship between diagrams and canvases.
• Part 3 introduces the process of making the Creative Work canvas.
• Part 4 reflects on the canvas practice in the context of knowledge curation.

This article also produces a by-product: a brief of the book Career Curation: Curativity Theory for Personal Innovation. I wrote 106 pages for the book in…