Activity Theory

Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) describes how human activity is shaped by the complex web of participants and their systemic constraints. That is, CHAT explores the relationship between mind and activity, oriented by the Socio-Cultural Theory insight that one’s consciousness is shaped by social experience and mediated by artefacts.

Complex Systems Research focuses on systems comprising sets of agents that form unified wholes in their interactions, relationships, or dependencies. Their emergent, global behaviors cannot be predicted on the basis of the rules governing the individual agents. Definitions and descriptions of complex systems revolve around such terms as emergent, adaptive, nonlinear, irreducible, noncompressible, non-decomposable, multi-level, self-organizing, context-sensitive, and adaptive.

Socio-Cultural Theory begins with the assertion that what is learnable begins as externalized possibilities, which learners gradually internalize through imitation of others, rehearsal with others, and other modes of participation in culturally relevant activities. Social interaction is thus stressed as prior and fundamental to cognition; consciousness and cognition are the products of socialization.

Design Thinking is about the cognitive, strategic, and practical processes associated with designing solutions and/or products. Design Thinking is considered a process for innovation and includes problem seeking and identification, imagining solutions or products, planning, creating, prototyping, testing, and improving, as it spans solution-based strategies for solving ill-defined problems across human-made and natural contexts.

The study of mind and behavior.