CONCEPT
Process vs. Purpose Identification
The distinction within domain identification — between attachment to the how of one's practice and attachment to the why — that determines whether a practitioner can navigate technological disruption.
Process identification is attachment to the specific techniques and workflows through which one has practiced a domain. Purpose identification is attachment to the domain itself — its problems, its questions, its community, its significance. Both are forms of identification, but they have radically different properties under conditions of technological change. The 1830s portrait painters who identified with the process of likeness-capture experienced photography as existential threat. The painters who identified with painting as a mode of seeing experienced photography as liberation from constraint. Nakamura's framework identifies the transition from process to purpose identification as the developmental achievement that makes vital engagement disruption-resistant.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The distinction operates at the level of what the practitioner's identity is built around. The process-identified calligrapher whose sense of self is constructed through the specific act of shaping letters with a brush experiences the printing press as a threat to her identity. The purpose-identified calligrapher whose sense of self is built