A methodological framework
The Somiological Method is a design and analytic framework for examining how understanding develops and for creating environments that support it.
It is not a curriculum, a script, or a set of techniques.
It does not prescribe content or instructional sequences.
Instead, it provides a principled way to ask:
What must a learner be able to enact, in context, for understanding to occur?
The five enacted modalities
From a somiological perspective, understanding arises through the coordinated enactment of five inseparable dimensions of activity:
- Forming — the lived shaping of patterns, structures, relations, and variation
- Materializing — bodily engagement with resistance, texture, force, and substance
- Purposing — felt intention, motivation, and orientation that organize action
- Functioning — coordinated doing that accomplishes something meaningful
- Affording — perception of possibilities for action within a situation
These are not static categories or properties of objects.
They are dynamic dimensions of lived events, enacted together.
Contextual nexus
The Somiological Method emphasizes the contextual nexus—the relational field through which meaning arises. Cultural practices, social norms, emotional stakes, material conditions, histories of experience, and purposes are not added after the fact; they are integral to understanding itself.
Variation and stabilization
Understanding develops through variation, not repetition alone. Encountering the same underlying event-structure across changing conditions allows the nervous system to stabilize patterns that are both durable and flexible.
The Somiological Method therefore prioritizes:
- enactment over explanation,
- variation over rote practice,
- environmental design over information delivery.