Curativity Theory: The Ecological Approach to General Curation Practice

In 2019, I engaged in a series of wonderful epistemic activities. I wrote a book draft on one of my favorite topics — curation — and developed a theoretical approach called Curativity Theory. I also created several frameworks related to other themes.

I have worked in the field of curation for more than ten years. I served as the Chief Information Architect at BagTheWeb.com, an early tool for content curation (launched in 2010). This experience inspired my long-term commitment to the theme of curation. After a decade of practical work and theoretical exploration in curation-related domains, I coined the term Curativity and developed Curativity Theory, which became the foundation of my book.

The core idea of Curativity Theory is very simple:

In order to effectively curate pieces into a meaningful whole, we need a Container as a part to contain and shape the pieces.

The theory establishes a new ontology — “Whole, Piece, and Part” — and incorporates James Gibson’s concept of affordance, George Lakoff’s notion of the container, and Donald Schön’s idea of reflection as epistemological tools. To test the theory, I wrote several case studies, including one titled Knowledge…