31 Mayıs 2009 Pazar

tasarımcı nasıl bilir? | how does the designer know?

[at last, we arrived at Nigel Cross, actually if i had energy, or patience left, i would rather inspect into Lawson... this will be the last for now, and maybe a few paragraphs about richard florida will end the series for this summer. i need a mind-break and different occupations are waiting.]

Designerly Ways of Knowing
Nigel Cross
Birkhäuser, Basel • Boston • Berlin, 2003


chapter 1: Designerly Ways Of Knowing *First published in Design Studies Vol 3, No 4, October 1982, pp. 221–227.
[this text suggests design education to be part of the “general education”, as a third culture, besides sciences and humanities, so i cited it exhaustively:]
17> A principal outcome of a research project at the Royal College of Art on ‘Design in General Education’ was the statement of a belief in a missing ‘third area’ of education. The two already established areas can be broadly classified as education in the sciences and education in the arts, or humanities. These ‘two cultures’ have long been recognised as dominating our social, cultural and educational systems. In the traditional English educational system, especially, children have been required to choose one or other of these two cultures to specialise in at a relatively early age. The ‘third culture’ is not so easily recognised, simply because it has been neglected, and has not been adequately named or articulated. In their report (Royal College of Art, 1979), Bruce Archer and his colleagues were prepared to call it ‘Design with a capital D’ and to articulate it as ‘the collected experience of the material culture, and the collected body of experience, skill and understanding embodied in the arts of planning, inventing, making and doing’. From the RCA report, the following conclusions can be drawn on the nature of ‘Design with a capital D’:
_The central concern of Design is ‘the conception and realisation of new things’.
_It encompasses the appreciation of ‘material culture’ and the application of ‘the arts of planning, inventing, making and doing’.
_At its core is the ‘language’ of ‘modelling’; it is possible to develop students’ aptitudes in this ‘language’, equivalent to aptitudes in the ‘language’ of the sciences (numeracy) and the ‘language’ of humanities (literacy).
_Design has its own distinct ‘things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’.
Even a ‘three cultures’ view of human knowledge and ability is a simple model. However, contrasting design with the sciences and the humanities is a useful, if crude, way of beginning to be more articulate about it. Education in any of these ‘cultures’ entails the following three aspects:
_the transmission of knowledge about a phenomenon of study
_a training in the appropriate methods of enquiry
_an initiation into the belief systems and values of the culture
p21> [here’re some intrinsic values of education, in contrast to pragmatic ones, but they’re undefined (by definition?), still i might have used this idea against professionalistic education:] I have considered Peters’ three criteria for ‘education’ at some length because it is important for the proponents of design in general education to be able to meet such criteria. It entails a fundamental change of perspective from that of a vocational training for a design profession, which is the only kind of ‘design education’ we have had previously. Design in general education is not primarily a preparation for a career, nor is it primarily a training in useful productive skills for ‘doing and making’ in industry. It must be defined in terms of the intrinsic values of education.
p22> Ways of Knowing in Design: The claim from the Royal College of Art study of ‘Design in General Education’ was that ‘there are things to know, ways of knowing them, and ways of finding out about them’ that are specific to the design area.
23> The essential difference between these two strategies is that while the scientists focused their attention on discovering the rule, the architects were obsessed with achieving the desired result. The scientists adopted a generally problem-focused strategy and the architects a solution-focused strategy. Although it would be quite possible using the architect’s approach to achieve the best solution without actually discovering the complete range of acceptable solutions, in fact most architects discovered something about the rule governing the allowed combination of blocks. In other words, they learn about the nature of the problem largely as a result of trying out solutions, whereas the scientists set out specifically to study the problem. ...
This suggests that architects learn to adopt their solution-focused strategy during, and presumably as a result of, their education. Presumably, they learn, are taught, or discover, that this is the more effective way of tackling the problems they are set. ... A central feature of design activity, then, is its reliance on generating fairly quickly a satisfactory solution, rather than on any prolonged analysis of the problem. In Simon’s (1969) inelegant term, it is a process of ‘satisficing’ rather than optimising; producing any one of what might well be a large range of satisfactory solutions rather than attempting to generate the one hypothetically optimum solution. This strategy has been observed in other studies of design behaviour, including engineers (Marples, 1960), urban designers (Levin, 1966) and architects (Eastman, 1970). ... It is also now widely recognised that design problems are ill-defined, ill-structured, or ‘wicked’ (Rittel and Webber, 1973). They are not the same as the ‘puzzles’ that scientists, mathematicians and other scholars set themselves. They are not problems for which all the necessary information is, or ever can be, available to the problem-solver. They are therefore not susceptible to exhaustive analysis, and there can never be a guarantee that ‘correct’ solutions can be found for them. In this context, a solution-focused strategy is clearly preferable to a problem-focused one: it will always be possible to go on analysing ‘the problem’, but the designer’s task is to produce ‘the solution’. It is only in terms of a conjectured solution that the problem can be contained within manageable bounds (Hillier and Leaman, 1974). What designers tend to do, therefore, is to seek, or impose a ‘primary generator’ (Darke, 1979) which both defines the limits of the problem and suggests the nature of its possible solution.
24> [the self confidence, that we are so fond of:] In order to cope with ill-defined problems, designers have to learn to have the self-confidence to define, redefine and change the problem-as-given in the light of the solution that emerges from their minds and hands. People who seek the certainty of externally structured, well-defined problems will never appreciate the delight of being a designer. Jones (1970) has commented that ‘changing the problem in order to find a solution is the most challenging and difficult part of designing.’ ...
27> Intrinsic Value of Design Education:
The arguments for, and defence of, design in general education must rest on identifying the intrinsic values of design that make it justifiably a part of everyone’s education. Above, I have tried to set out the field of ‘designerly ways of knowing’, as it relates to both the processes and the products of designing, in the hope that it will lead into an understanding of what these intrinsic values might be. Essentially, we can say that designerly ways of knowing rest on the manipulation of non-verbal codes in the material culture; these codes translate ‘messages’ either way between concrete objects and abstract requirements; they facilitate the constructive, solution-focused thinking of the designer, in the same way that other (e.g. verbal and numerical) codes facilitate analytic, problem-focused thinking; they are probably the most effective means of tackling the characteristically illdefined problems of planning, designing and inventing new things. From even a sketchy analysis, such as this, of designerly ways of knowing, we can indeed begin to identify features that can be justified in education as having intrinsic value. Firstly, we can say that design develops students’ abilities in tackling a particular kind of problem. This kind of problem is characterised as illdefined, or ill-structured, and is quite distinct from the kinds of well-structured problems that lie in the educational domains of the sciences and the humanities. We might even claim that our design problems are more ‘real’ than theirs, in that they are like the problems or issues or decisions that people are more usually faced with in everyday life. There is therefore a strong educational justification for design as an introduction to, and assisting in the development of, cognitive skills and abilities in real world problem solving (Fox, 1981). We must be careful not to interpret this justification 28> in instrumental terms, as a training in problem-solving skills, but in terms that satisfy the more rigorous criteria for education. As far as problem-solving is concerned, design in general education must be justified in terms of helping to develop an ‘educated’ person, able to understand the nature of ill-defined problems, how to tackle them, and how they differ from other kinds of problems. This kind of justification has been developed by McPeck (1981) in terms of the educational value of ‘critical thinking’. A related justification is given by Harrison (1978), particularly in the context of practical design work, in terms of the radical connections between ‘making and thinking’.
This leads us into a second area of justification for design in general education, based on the kind of thinking that is peculiar to design. This characteristically ‘constructive’ thinking is distinct from the more commonly acknowledged inductive and deductive kinds of reasoning. ... In educational terms, the development of constructive thinking must be seen as a neglected aspect of cognitive development in the individual. This neglect can be traced to the dominance of the cultures of the sciences and the humanities, and the dominance of the ‘stage’ theories of cognitive development. These theories, especially Piaget’s, tend to suggest that the concrete, constructive, synthetic kinds of reasoning occur relatively early in child development, and that they are passed through to reach the higher states of abstract, analytical reasoning (i.e. the kinds of reasoning that predominate in the sciences, especially). There are other theories (for example, Bruner’s) that suggest that cognitive development is a continuous process of interaction between different modes of cognition, all of which can be developed to high levels. That is, the qualitatively different types of cognition (e.g. ‘concrete’ and ‘formal’ types in Piaget’s terms, ‘iconic’ and ‘symbolic’ in Bruner’s terms) are not simply characteristic of different ‘stages’ of development, but are different kinds of innate human cognitive abilities, all of which can be developed from lower to higher levels. The concrete/iconic modes of cognition are particularly relevant in design, whereas the formal/symbolic modes are more relevant in the sciences. If the ‘continuous’ rather than the ‘stage’ theories of cognitive development are adopted, it is clear that there is a strong justification for design education in that it provides opportunities particularly for the development of the concrete/iconic modes. From this, we can move on to a third area of justification for design in general education, based on the recognition that there are large areas of human cognitive ability that have been systematically ignored in our educational system. Because most theorists of cognitive development are themselves thoroughly immersed in the scientific-academic cultures where numeracy and literacy prevail, they have overlooked the third culture of design. This culture relies not so much on verbal, numerical and literary modes of thinking and communicating, but on nonverbal modes. This is particularly evident in the designer’s use of models and ‘codes’ that 29> French (1979) has recognised nonverbal thinking as perhaps the principal justification for design in general education: ‘It is in strengthening and uniting the entire non-verbal education of the child, and in its improvement of the range of acuity of his thinking, that the prime justification of the teaching of design in schools should be sought, not in preparing for a career or leisure, nor in training knowledgeable consumers, valuable as these aspects may be.
I identified five aspects of designerly ways of knowing:

1. Designers tackle ‘ill-defined’ problems. 2. Their mode of problem-solving is ‘solution-focused’. 3. Their mode of thinking is ‘constructive’. 4. They use ‘codes’ that translate abstract requirements into concrete objects. 5. They use these codes to both ‘read’ and ‘write’ in ‘object languages’.
30> From these ways of knowing I drew three main areas of justification for design in general education: 1. Design develops innate abilities in solving real-world, illdefined problems. 2. Design sustains cognitive development in the concrete/iconic modes of cognition. 3. Design offers opportunities for development of a wide range of abilities in nonverbal thought and communication. ...
The research path to design as a discipline has concentrated on understanding those general features of design activity that are common to all the design professions: it has been concerned with ‘design in general’ and it now allows us to generalise at least a little about the designerly ways of knowing. The education path to design as a discipline has also been concerned with ‘design in general’, and it has led us to consider what it is that can be generalised as of intrinsic value in learning to design. Both the research and the education paths, then, have been concerned with developing the general subject of design. ...
31> We need a ‘research programme’, in the sense in which Lakatos (1970) has described the research programmes of science. At its core is a ‘touch-stone theory’ or idea – in our case the view that ‘there are designerly ways of knowing’. Around this core is built a ‘defensive’ network of related theories, ideas and knowledge – and I have tried to sketch in some of these in this chapter. In this way both design research and design education can develop a common approach to design as a discipline.

[this chapter illustrates the ill-defined design problem in relation with the solution focused designer behaviour:]
chapter 2. THE NATURE AND NURTURE OF DESIGN ABILITY * First presented as inaugural lecture as Professor of Design Studies, The Open University, 1989, and first published in Design Studies Vol 11, No 3, July 1990, pp. 127–140.
34> The kind of thinking that is going on is multi-facetted and multi-levelled. The designer is thinking of the whole range of design criteria and requirements set by the client’s brief, of technical and legal issues, and of self-imposed criteria such as the aesthetic and formal attributes of the proposal. Often, the problem as set by the client’s brief will be vague, and it is only by the designer suggesting possible solutions that the client’s requirements and criteria become clear. ...
35> ... one feature of design activity that is frequently confirmed by such studies is the importance of the use of several initial, conjectured solutions by the designer. In his pioneering case studies of engineering design, Marples (1960) suggested that: The nature of the problem can only be found by examining it through proposed solutions, and it seems likely that its examination through one, and only one, proposal gives a very biased view. It seems probable that at least two radically different solutions need to be attempted in order to get, through comparisons of subproblems, a clear picture of the ‘real nature’ of the problem. ...
This view emphasises the role of the conjectured solution as a way of gaining understanding of the design problem, and the need, therefore, to generate a variety of solutions precisely as a means of problem-analysis. It has been confirmed by Darke’s (1979) interviews with architects, where she observed how they imposed a limited set of objectives or a specific solution concept as a ‘primary generator’ for an initial solution: The greatest variety reduction or narrowing down of the range of solutions occurs early on in the design process, with a conjecture or conceptualization of a possible solution. Further understanding of the problem is gained by testing this conjectured solution. ... The freedom – and necessity – of the designer to re-define the problem through the means of solution-conjecture was also observed in protocol studies of architects by Akin (1979), who commented: One of the unique aspects of design behaviour is the constant generation of new task goals and redefinition of task constraints.
36> It has been suggested that this feature of design behaviour arises from the nature of design problems: they are not the sort of problems or puzzles that provide all the necessary and sufficient information for their solution. Some of the relevant information can only be found by generating and testing solutions; some information, or ‘missing ingredient’, has to be provided by the designer himself, as noted by Levin (1966) from his observations of urban designers. Levin suggested that this extra ingredient is often an ‘ordering principle’ and hence we find the formal properties that are so often evident in designers’ work, from towns designed as simple stars to teacups designed as regular cylinders. However, designers do not always find it easy to generate a range of alternative solutions in order that they better understand the problem. Their ‘ordering principles’ or ‘primary generators’ can, of course, be found to be inappropriate, but designers often try to hang on to them, because of the difficulties of going back and starting afresh. From his case studies of architectural design, Rowe (1987) observed: A dominant influence is exerted by initial design ideas on subsequent problem-solving directions… Even when severe problems are encountered, a considerable effort is made to make the initial idea work, rather than to stand back and adopt a fresh point of departure.
This tenacity is understandable but undesirable, given the necessity of using alternative solutions as a means of understanding the ‘real nature’ of the problem. However, Waldron and Waldron (1988), from their engineering design case study, came to a more optimistic view about the ‘self-correcting’ nature of the design process: The premises that were used in initial concept generation often proved, on subsequent investigation, to be wholly or partly fallacious. Nevertheless, they provided a necessary starting point. The process can be viewed as inherently self-correcting, since later work tends to clarify and correct earlier work. It becomes clear from these studies of designing that architects, engineers, and other designers adopt a problem-solving strategy based on generating and testing potential solutions.
37> This ‘abductive’ reasoning is a concept from the philosopher Peirce, who distinguished it from the other more well-known modes of inductive and deductive reasoning. Peirce (quoted by March) suggested that ‘Deduction proves that something must be; induction shows that something actually is operative; abduction merely suggests that something may be.’ It is therefore the logic of conjecture. March prefers to use the term ‘productive’ reasoning. Others, such as Bogen (1969), have used terms such as ‘appositional’ reasoning in contra distinction to propositional reasoning.
Design ability is therefore founded on the resolution of ill-defined problems by adopting a solution-focussing strategy and productive or appositional styles of thinking. However, the design approach is not necessarily limited to ill-defined problems. Thomas and Carroll (1979) conducted a number of experiments and protocol studies of designing and concluded that a fundamental aspect is the nature of the approach taken to problems, rather than the nature of the problems themselves: Design is a type of problem solving in which the problem solver views the problem or acts as though there is some ill-definedness in the goals, initial conditions or allowable transformations.
38> Design ability ... relies fundamentally on non-verbal media of thought and communication.
... the core features of design ability as comprising abilities to: 1. resolve ill-defined problems 2. adopt solution-focussing strategies 3. employ abductive/productive/appositional thinking 4. use non-verbal, graphic/spatial modelling media.
43> [the old conception of design education, schön’s studio:] The crude, simple work of the first-year student develops into sophisticated, complex work by the final year. But the educational processes which nurture this development are poorly understood – if at all – and rely heavily on the project method. In pre-industrial society, there was really no such thing as design education. People learned to make products in learning the skills of a trade, they were apprenticed to a master craftsperson, and they learned to copy. In many respects, the old tradition of design education, derived from the Beaux Arts School, was based on apprenticeship. Students worked closely with a master; they learned set responses to set problems; products and processes were predictable.
44> Modern, industrial design education owes much to the experimental work of the Bauhaus – the German design school of the nineteen-twenties and -thirties – in particular, the radical ‘basic course’ introduced by Johannes Itten. As Anita Cross (1983) has suggested, many of the basic course’s educational principles may well have been developed from, or influenced by the work of educational innovators such as Froebel, Montessori and Dewey. The Bauhaus also integrated design education with aesthetic cultures such as dance, theatre and music, as well as cultures of technology and industry. ... Most of the Bauhaus innovations are now severely watered-down in conventional design education, usually retaining just a few vestiges of exercises in colour, form and composition. With the possible exception of the Hochschule für Gestaltung (HfG) at Ulm in the nineteen-sixties, there have been no comparable innovations in curriculum development in design education since the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933. ...
[general education and professional education:] ... In professional education the distinctions between education and training are perhaps less clear-cut than they are in general education, where no particular profession is the goal. Professional education has instrumental or extrinsic aims, whereas general education has to pursue intrinsic aims that are somehow inherently good for the individual. I suggest that it is through understanding the nature of design ability that we can begin to construct an understanding of the intrinsic values of design education. For example, we can make a strong justification for design based on its development of personal abilities in resolving ill-defined problems – which are quite different from the well-defined problems dealt with in other areas of the curriculum. We can also justify the designer’s solution-focused strategies and appositional thinking styles as promoting a certain type of cognitive development – in educational terms, the concrete/iconic modes that are often assumed to be the ‘earlier’ or
‘minor’ modes of cognition, and less important than the formal/symbolic modes. Furthermore, there is a sound justification in the educational value of design in its development of the whole area of non-verbal thought and communication.
45> [design education as part of the general education:] Making design education accessible means making it available to everyone. In many countries, design is now a part of general education – it is taught in schools to children. This means that design education is no longer just a preparation for a profession, but is recognised as having intrinsic value in the development of everyone’s intellect. It has become a part of our individual and collective intellectual culture, just like literature, science or mathematics; it has become a part of basic educational proficiency, just like reading, writing and numeracy. [the idea of virtual design studio:] ... It is no longer necessary to be physically present in a design studio – neither in professional practice nor in education. [continuous studio:] Virtual studios and virtual universities can be open to everyone, around the world and round the clock. ... And just as education no longer stops at a certain time of day, it no longer stops at a certain age; accessibility and ubiquity also mean that education must be continuous and available throughout one’s lifetime. ...
46> ... [alleged need for tested education theories:] We need a secure foundation from which to question the relevance of conventional skills. We have moved beyond the apprenticeship system of pre-industrial design, and we must move beyond the pupilage system of industrial design education. We need to base design education on tested theories from education, psychology and cognitive science, and from design research, and we need a much stronger experimental base for educational innovation. ...
Conventional wisdom about the nature of expertise in problem-solving seems often to be contradicted by the behaviour of expert designers. But designing has many differences from conventional problem-solving, in which there is usually a single, correct solution to the problem. In design education we must therefore be very wary about importing models of behaviour from other fields. Empirical studies of design activity have frequently found ‘intuitive’ features of design ability to be the most effective and relevant to the intrinsic nature of design.

3. NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN DESIGN * First presented as the keynote speech at AI in Design, Lisbon, Portugal, 1998, and first published as ‘Natural Intelligence in Design’, Design Studies, Vol 20, No 1, January 1999, pp. 25–39.
p49> My starting point is that people are designers – and some people are very good designers. Designing is something that all people do; something that distinguishes us from other animals, and (so far) from machines. The ability to design is a part of human intelligence, and that ability is natural and widespread amongst the human population. ...
50> I collected some of the early examples of design research together in a book on Developments in Design Methodology (Cross, 1984), The kinds of methods for researching the nature of design thinking that have been used have included:
_Interviews with designers ... Examples include Lawson (1994) and Cross and Clayburn Cross (1996).
_Observations and case studies ... Examples include Candy and Edmonds (1996), Galle (1996) and Valkenburg and Dorst (1998).
_Protocol studies ... Examples include Lloyd and Scott (1994), Gero and McNeill (1998), and the Delft Protocols Workshop (Cross, et al., 1996).
_Reflection and theorising
... Leading examples are Simon (1969) and Schön (1983).
_Simulation trials ... Many examples have been included in the proceedings of the series of AI in Design conferences, starting in 1991.

54> I think we have to acknowledge that design is risky – it is not comfortable, and it is not easy.
59> ... My first postgraduate research project, at the Design Research Laboratory at UMIST, Manchester, directed by John Christopher Jones, was in ‘Simulation of Computer Aided Design’ (Cross, 1967). At its core was a novel but strange idea that we might get some insights into what CAD might be like, and what the design requirements for CAD systems might be, by attempting to simulate the use of CAD facilities which at that time were mostly hypotheses and suggestions for future systems that hardly anyone really knew how to begin to develop. The strangeness about this idea was that we would effect these simulations through getting human beings to pretend to be the computers! This was the reverse application of the ‘Turing Test’. [!!!]
62> And of course, there is something else as well. Instead of machines that do things that people enjoy doing, and are good at doing, we want machines to do things that are arduous and difficult for human beings to do. We also want machines to do things that are not merely arduous or difficult for human beings to do, but to do things that human beings simply cannot do unaided. So rather than just imitate human abilities, some of our design machines should also do things that designers cannot do. [for me, as a laborer of design automation studies, machines, that could do even less than the human designer would suffice! ‘cause, if a machine can do it, just let it do!]
[following chapter is particularly interesting, where cross identifies a specific “creative leap”, far from being a leap, as being gradually prepared:]

4. CREATIVE COGNITION IN DESIGN I: THE CREATIVE LEAP * First published as ‘Modelling the Creative Leap’ in the preprints of the international workshop Computational Models of Creative Design III, edited by J S Gero, M L Maher and F Sudweeks, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney, Australia, 1995.

65> ... in engineering and design, significant innovations or novel design concepts are often reported as arising as sudden illuminations (Maccoby, 1991). The idea of ‘the creative leap’ has for some time been regarded as central to the design process (Archer, 1965). Whilst a ‘creative leap’ may not be a required feature of routine design, it must surely be a feature of non-routine, creative design. Some would argue that all design, by its very nature, is creative. However, there are times when a designer will generate a particularly novel design proposal, and there is evidence that the level of ‘creativity’ of a design proposal can be reliably assessed, at least by peer-groups (Amabile, 1982; Christiaans, 1992). [creativity assessed by peer groups: that’s a practically important assumption for me, i need it for evaluation]
66> We shall see that the creative cognitive act in design appears to be not so much taking a leap as building a bridge between problem requirements and solution proposal.
76> ... [after a specific design process’ protocol analysis:] But in practice, as we have seen in the extracts from the design team’s protocols, and has been suggested by others (March, 1976), designers usually proceed by suggesting ‘protomodels’ of forms or structures, and evaluating these in order to amplify the requirements or desired functions. Takeda et al. (1996), in their analysis of the team protocol, showed how functions, as well as structures, develop and evolve during the course of the design process. The ‘function’ of a product to be designed is not, therefore, a static concept, a ‘given’ at the start of the design process.
78> Not Leaping but Bridging:
This study of one example of a ‘creative leap’ in design has suggested that the example creative leap could conceivably be modelled by procedures such as combination, mutation, analogy, emergence, or designing from first principles. Because there is no overt record of the designers’ cognitive processes, it is not possible to identify which, if any, of the creative procedures actually occurred in the example.
However, if computational models of such procedures can be constructed, then progress is possible in computational modelling of creative design. Computational modelling of creative processes in the arts and sciences has had some reported success (Boden, 1990). The relative lack of progress in computational modelling of creative design may be due to the ‘appositional’ nature of design reasoning, in which function and form are developed in parallel, rather than in series. ... In practice, designing seems to proceed by oscillating between sub-solution and sub-problem areas, as well as by decomposing the problem and combining sub-solutions.

5. CREATIVE COGNITION IN DESIGN II: CREATIVE STRATEGIES * First published as ‘Strategic Knowledge Exercised by Outstanding Designers’ in the preprints of the international workshop Strategic Knowledge and Concept Formation III, edited by J S Gero and K Hori, Key Centre of Design Computing, University of Sydney, Australia, 2001.
94> [after descriptions of three expert designers’ designerly behaviour:] ... all three designers appear to explore the problem space from a particular perspective in order to frame the problem in a way that stimulates and pre-structures the emergence of design concepts.
97> From the analysis of the three examples, it appears that there are similar aspects to the creative strategies adopted by all three exceptional designers. It is perhaps surprising to see such commonalities between the three, considering the great disparity between the design projects in which they were engaged. However, although there are similarities in creative strategies across domains, this does not necessarily mean that experts can successfully switch practice between domains. Ericsson and Lehmann (1996) found that the superior performance of experts is usually domain-specific, and does not transfer across domains. Extensive training within a domain still seems to be crucial to professional expertise.

6. UNDERSTANDING DESIGN COGNITION * First presented at the international workshop on Knowing and Learning in Design, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, 1999, and first published as ‘Design Cognition: Results from Protocol and Other Empirical Studies of Design Activity’ in Design Knowing and Learning: Cognition in Design Education

100> ... In design, ‘problems’ are often defined only in relation to ideas for their ‘solution’, and designers do not typically proceed by first attempting to define their problems rigorously. ... Instead of generating abstract relationships and attributes, then deriving the appropriate object to be considered, the subjects always generated a design element and then determined its qualities.’ That is to say, the designer-subjects jumped to ideas for solutions (or partial solutions) before they had fully formulated the problem. This is a reflection of the fact that designers are solution-led, not problem-led; for designers, it is the evaluation of the solution that is important, not the analysis of the problem. It is not just that problem-analysis is weak in design; even when problem goals and constraints are known or defined, they are not sacrosanct, and designers exercise the freedom to change goals and constraints, as understanding of the problem develops and definition of the solution proceeds. This was a feature of designer behaviour noted by Akin (1979) from his protocol studies of architects: ‘One of the unique aspects of design behaviour is the constant generation of new task goals and redefinition of task constraints.’ As Ullman et al. (1988) pointed out, only some constraints are ‘given’ in a design problem; other constraints are ‘introduced’ by the designer from domain knowledge, and others are ‘derived’ by the designer during the exploration of particular solution concepts.
[main characteristics of designerly cognition:]
a. Problem Formulation
114> Goal Analysis: Designers appear to be ‘ill-behaved’ problem solvers, in that they do not spend much time and attention on defining the problem. However, this seems to be appropriate behaviour, since some studies have suggested that over-concentration on problem definition does not lead to successful design outcomes. It appears that successful design behaviour is based not on extensive problem analysis, but on adequate ‘problem scoping’, and on a focused or directed approach to gathering problem information and prioritising criteria. Setting and changing goals are inherent elements of design activity.
114> Solution Focusing: Designers are solution-focused, not problem-focused. This appears to be a feature of design cognition which comes with education and experience in designing. In particular, experience in a specific problem domain enables designers to move quickly to identifying a problem ‘frame’ and proposing a solution conjecture.
102> Co-evolution of Problem and Solution: Designers tend to use solution conjectures as the means of developing their understanding of the problem. Since ‘the problem’ cannot be fully understood in isolation from consideration of ‘the solution’, it is natural that solution conjectures should be used as a means of helping to explore and understand the problem formulation. As Kolodner and Wills (1996) observed, from a study of senior student engineering designers: ‘Proposed solutions often directly remind designers of issues to consider. The problem and solution co-evolve.
Problem Framing: Designers are not limited to ‘given’ problems, but find and formulate problems within the broad context of the design brief. This is the characteristic of reflective practice identified by Schön (1983) as problem setting: ‘Problem setting is the process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.’ This seems to characterise well what has been observed of the problem formulation aspects of design behaviour. Designers select features of the problem space to which they choose to attend (naming) and identify areas of the solution space in which they choose to explore (framing). Schön (1988) suggests that: ‘In order to formulate a design problem to be solved, the designer must frame a problematic design situation: set its boundaries, select particular things and relations for attention, and impose on the situation a coherence that guides subsequent moves.’
103> b. Solution Generation
The solution-focused nature of designer behaviour appears to be appropriate behaviour for responding to ill-defined problems. Such problems can perhaps never be converted to well-defined problems, and so designers quite reasonably adopt the more realistic strategy of finding a satisfactory solution, rather than expecting to be able to generate an optimum solution to a well-defined problem. However, this solution-focused behaviour also seems to have potential drawbacks. One such drawback might be the ‘fixation’ effect induced by existing solutions.
104> Fixation: ... Designers may be too ready to re-use features of known existing designs, rather than to explore the problem and generate new design features. ... Purcell and Gero therefore concluded that the industrial designers seem to be ‘fixated on being different’, and that ‘fixation’ in design may exist in a number of forms. [this is reminiscent of our fixation with creativity] ... It is not clear that ‘fixation’ is necessarily a bad thing in design.
105> Attachment to Concepts: Another form of ‘fixation’ that has been found to exist amongst designers is their attachment to early solution ideas and concepts. Although designers change goals and constraints as they design, they appear to hang on to their principal solution concept for as long as possible, even when detailed development of the scheme throws up unexpected difficulties and shortcomings in the solution concept. Some of the changing of goals and constraints during designing is associated with resolving such difficulties without having to start again with a major new concept.
106> Generation of Alternatives: ... Fricke (1993, 1996), from protocol studies of engineering designers, found that both generating few alternative concepts and generating a large number of alternatives were equally weak strategies, leading to poor design solutions. Where there was ‘unreasonable restriction’ of the search space (when only one or a very few alternative concepts were generated), designers became ‘fixated’ on concrete 107> solutions too early. In the case of ‘excessive expansion’ of the search space (generating large numbers of alternative solution concepts), designers were then forced to spend time on organising and managing the set of variants, rather than on careful evaluation and modification of the alternatives. Fricke identified successful designers to be those operating a ‘balanced search’ for solution alternatives.
Creativity: Designers themselves often emphasise the role of ‘intuition’ in the generation of solutions, and ‘creativity’ is widely regarded as an essential element in design thinking. Creative design is often characterised by the occurrence of a significant event, usually called the ‘creative leap’. Recent studies of creative events in design have begun to shed more light on this previously mysterious (and often mystified) aspect of design. ... In these studies, Akin and Akin were looking for cases of the ‘sudden mental insight’ (SMI) that is commonly reported in cases of creative problem solving. They referred to the ‘fixation’ effect, such as the implicit nine-dot square, as a ‘frame of reference’ (FR) that has to be broken out of in order to generate creative alternatives. They suggested that a SMI occurs when a subject perceives their own fixation within a standard FR, and simultaneously perceives a new FR. The new FR also has to include procedures for generating a solution to the problem.
108> It may be also that ‘creative leaps’ or ‘sudden mental insights’ are not so personal and idiosyncratic as has been promoted before. In protocol studies of experienced industrial designers, Cross and Dorst (1998) observed that all nine subjects reported the same ‘creative breakthrough’. All nine linked together the same pieces of available information and used this as a basis for their solution concept. All nine appeared to think that this was a unique personal insight.
Sketching: Several researchers have investigated the ways in which sketching helps to promote creativity in design thinking. Sketching helps the designer to find unintended consequences, the surprises that keep the design exploration going in what Schön and Wiggins (1992) called the ‘reflective conversation with the situation’ that is characteristic of design thinking. ...
109>c. Process Strategy:
An aspect of concern in design methodology and related areas of design research has been the many attempts at proposing systematic models of the design process, and suggestions for methodologies or structured approaches that should lead designers efficiently towards a good solution. However, most design in practice still appears to proceed in a rather ad-hoc and unsystematic way. Many designers remain wary of systematic procedures that, in general, still have to prove their value in design practice.
Structured Processes: It is not clear whether learning a systematic process actually helps student designers. ... These designers worked reasonably efficiently and followed a fairly logical procedure, whether or not they had been educated in a systematic approach. In comparison, designers with too-rigid adherence 110> to a methodical procedure (behaving ‘unreasonably methodical’), or with very un-systematic approaches, produced mediocre or poor design solutions. ... The occurrence of some relatively simple patterns of design process activity has often been suggested from anecdotal knowledge. For example, there has been a broad assumption that designing proceeds in cycles of analysis-synthesis-evaluation activities. Although such patterns of design process activity frequently have been proposed or hypothesised, there has been little empirical confirmation.
Opportunism: In contrast to studies that confirm the prevalence and relevance of fairly structured design behaviour, there have also been reports of some studies that emphasised the ‘opportunistic’ behaviour of designers. 111> However, rather than regarding opportunism as unprincipled design behaviour, Guindon had suggested it might be inevitable in design: ‘These deviations are not special cases due to bad design habits or performance breakdowns but are, rather, a natural consequence of the ill-structuredness of problems in the early stages of design.’ So it may be that we should not equate ‘opportunistic’ with ‘unprincipled’ behaviour in design, but rather that we should regard ‘opportunism’ as characteristic of expert design behaviour.
Modal Shifts: An aspect of cognitive strategy that emerges from several studies is that, especially during creative periods of conceptual design, designers alternate rapidly in shifts of attention between different aspects of their task, or between different modes of activity.
112> Novices and Experts: Novice behaviour is usually associated with a ‘depth-first’ approach to problem solving, i.e. sequentially identifying and exploring sub-solutions in depth, whereas the strategies of experts are usually regarded as being predominantly top-down and breadth-first approaches. But this may be too simplistic a view of the reality of process strategy in design. ... They concluded that ‘it would be surprising if it is practicable for expert designers to adopt a purely breadth-first or depth-first approach. Indeed, a flexible mixture of modes is a more psychologically realistic control structure for expert design.’ They suggested that, whilst a depth-first approach minimises cognitive load, a breadth-first approach minimises commitment and optimises design time and effort. Those suggestions would also quite reasonably reflect the respective concerns and strategies that we might expect of novices and experts.

7. DESIGN AS A DISCIPLINE * First presented as ‘Designerly Ways of Knowing: Design Discipline vs Design Science’ at the international conference Design+Research, Politecnico di Milano, Italy, 2000.
119> [for our overt disregard for methodology in both design research and the studio:]
... aspirations to scientise design surfaced strongly again in the ‘design methods movement’ of the 1960s. The Conference on Design Methods, held in London in September, 1962 (Jones and Thornley, 1963) is generally regarded as the event which marked the launch of design methodology as a subject or field of enquiry. The desire of the new movement was even more strongly than before to base design process (as well as the products of design) on objectivity and rationality. The origins of this emergence of new design methods in the 1960s lay in the application of novel, scientific and computational methods to the novel and pressing problems of the 2nd World War – from which came civilian developments such as operations research and management decision-making techniques.

120> ... the decade culminated with Herbert Simon’s (1969) outline of ‘the sciences of the artificial’ and his specific plea for the development of ‘a science of design’ in the universities: ‘a body of intellectually tough, analytic, partly formalizable, partly empirical, teachable doctrine about the design process.’ However, in the 1970s there emerged a backlash against design methodology and a rejection of its underlying values, notably by some of the early pioneers of the movement. Christopher Alexander, who had originated a rational method for architecture and planning (Alexander, 1964), now said: ‘I’ve disassociated myself from the field… There is so little in what is called “design methods” that has anything useful to say about how to design buildings that I never even read the literature anymore… I would say forget it, forget the whole thing’ (Alexander, 1971). Another leading pioneer, J. Christopher Jones (1977) said: ‘In the 1970s I reacted against design methods. I dislike the machine language, the behaviourism, the continual attempt to fix the whole of life into a logical framework.’ To put the quotations of Alexander and Jones into context it may be necessary to recall the social/cultural climate of the late-1960s – the campus revolutions and radical political movements, the new liberal humanism and rejection of conservative values. But also it had to be acknowledged that there had been a lack of success in the application of ‘scientific’ methods to everyday design practice. Fundamental issues were also raised by Rittel and Webber (1973), who characterised design and planning problems as ‘wicked’ problems, fundamentally un-amenable to the techniques of science and engineering, which dealt with ‘tame’ problems. Nevertheless, design methodology continued to develop strongly, especially in engineering and some branches of industrial design. (Although there may still have been very limited evidence of practical applications and results.) The fruits of this work emerged in a series of books on engineering design methods and methodology in the 1980s. Just to mention some English-language ones, these included Tjalve (1979), Hubka (1982), Pahl and Beitz (1984), French (1985), Cross (1989), Pugh (1991). Another significant development throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s was the emergence of new journals of design research, theory and methodology. Just to refer, again, to English-language publications, these included Design Studies in 1979, Design Issues in 1984, Research in Engineering Design in 1989, the Journal of Engineering Design in 1990, Languages of Design in 1993 and the Design Journal in 1997.
121> The Design Research Society’s 1980 conference on ‘Design : Science : Method’ (Jacques and Powell, 1981) gave an opportunity to air many of these considerations. The general feeling from that conference was perhaps that it was time to move on from making simplistic comparisons and distinctions between science and design; that perhaps there was not so much for design to learn from science after all, and rather that perhaps science had something to learn from design. Cross et al. (1981) claimed that the epistemology of science was, in any case, in disarray, and therefore had little to offer an epistemology of design. Glynn (1985) later suggested that ‘it is the epistemology of design that has inherited the task of developing the logic of creativity, hypothesis innovation or invention that has proved so elusive to the philosophers of science.’
122> Design Science: [about the ever-fleeting idea of an institute of design sciences:] ‘Design Science’ was a term perhaps first used by Buckminster Fuller, but it was adapted by Gregory (1966) into the context of the 1965 conference on ‘The Design Method’. The concern to develop a design science thus led to attempts to formulate the design method – a single rationalised method, as ‘the scientific method’ was supposed to be. ...
So we might conclude that design science refers to an explicitly organised, rational and wholly systematic approach to design; not just the utilisation of scientific knowledge of artefacts, but design in some sense a scientific activity itself. This is certainly a controversial concept, challenged by many designers and design theorists.
123> Science of Design: However, Grant also made it clear that ‘the study of designing may be a scientific activity; that is, design as an activity may be the subject of scientific investigation.’ There remains some confusion between concepts of design science and of a science of design, since a ‘science of design’ seems to imply (or for some people has an aim of) the development of a ‘design science’. But the concept of a science of design has been clearly stated by Gasparski and Strzalecki (1990): ‘The science of design (should be) understood, just like the science of science, as a federation of subdisciplines having design as the subject of their cognitive interests’. ...
Design as a Discipline:
Donald Schön (1983) explicitly challenged the positivist doctrine underlying much of the ‘design science’ movement, and offered instead a constructivist paradigm. He criticised Simon’s ‘science of design’ for being based on approaches to solving well-formed problems, whereas professional practice throughout design and technology and elsewhere has to face and deal with ‘messy, problematic situations’. Schön proposed instead to search for ‘an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict,’ and which he characterised as ‘reflective practice’. Schön appeared to be more prepared than his positivist predecessors to put trust in the abilities displayed by competent practitioners, and to try to explicate those competencies rather than to supplant them. This approach has been developed particularly in the series of workshops and conferences known as the ‘Design Thinking Research Symposia’, beginning in 1991 (Cross, et al., 1992).
>It is the paradoxical task of creating an interdisciplinary discipline. Design as a discipline, rather than design as a science. This discipline seeks to develop domain-independent approaches to theory and research in design. The underlying axiom of this discipline is that there are forms of knowledge peculiar to the awareness and ability of a designer, independent of the different professional domains of design practice. Just as the other intellectual cultures in the sciences and the arts concentrate on the underlying forms of knowledge peculiar to the scientist or the artist, so we must concentrate on the ‘designerly’ ways of knowing, thinking and acting.
Design Research: At the 1980 ‘Design : Science : Method’ conference of the Design Research Society, Archer (1981) gave a simple but useful definition of research, which is that ‘Research is systematic enquiry, the goal of which is knowledge’. Our concern in design research has to be the development, articulation and communication of design knowledge. Where do we look for this knowledge? I believe that it has three sources: people, processes and products.
125> My own taxonomy of the field of design research would therefore fall into three main categories, based on people, process and products: 1. design epistemology – study of designerly ways of knowing 2. design praxiology – study of the practices and processes of design 3. design phenomenology – study of the form and configuration of artefacts ...
Good research is: Purposive based on identification of an issue or problem worthy and capable of investigation, Inquisitive seeking to acquire new knowledge, Informed conducted from an awareness of previous, related research, Methodical planned and carried out in a disciplined manner, Communicable generating and reporting results which are testable and accessible by others.

from the references:
Blakeslee, T R (1980) The Right Brain Macmillan, London, UK
Boden, M (1990) The Creative Mind: Myths and Mechanisms, Weidenfield and Nicolson, London, UK
Bogen, J E (1969) The Other Side of the Brain II: an appositional mind, Bulletin of the Los Angeles Neurological Societies Vol 34, No 3
Christiaans, H (1992) Creativity in Design: The Role of Domain Knowledge in Designing, Lemma, Utrecht, The Netherlands
Cross, N (ed.) (1984) Developments In Design Methodology, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK
Cross, N (1999) Design Research: a disciplined conversation, Design Issues Vol. 15, No. 2, pp. 5–10
Cross, N, Christiaans, H and Dorst, K (eds.) (1996) Analysing Design Activity, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK
Cross, N and Dorst, K (1998) Co-evolution of Problem and Solution Spaces in Creative Design: observations from an empirical study, in J Gero and M L Maher (eds.), Computational Models of Creative Design IV, University of Sydney, NSW, Australia
Naylor, G, The Bauhaus, Studio Vista, London, 1968)
Dorst, K (1997) Describing Design: a comparison of paradigms, PhD Thesis,
Eastman, C M (1970) On the Analysis of Intuitive Design Processes, in G T
Edwards, B (1979) Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Tarcher, Los Angeles, CA, USA
Gazzaniga, M S (1970) The Bisected Brain, Appleton Century Crofts, New York, USA
Gero, J (1994) Computational Models of Creative Design Processes, in Dartnall, T. (ed.), Artificial Intelligence and Creativity, Kluwer, Dordrecht, The Netherlands
Goldschmidt, G (1996), The Designer as a Team of One, in Cross, N. et al. (eds.), Analysing Design Activity, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK
Lawson, B (1994) Design In Mind, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, UK
Radcliffe, D (1996) Concurrency of Actions, Ideas and Knowledge Displays Within a Design Team, in Cross, N et al. (eds.), Analysing Design Activity, John Wiley and Sons Ltd., Chichester, UK
Schön, D (1983) The Reflective Practitioner, Temple-Smith, London, UK
Schön, D (1988) Designing: rules, types and worlds, Design Studies Vol 9, No 3, pp. 181–190
Sperry, R W, Gazzaniga, M S and Bogen, J E (1969) Interhemispheric Relations: the neocortical commissures; syndromes of hemispheric disconnection, in Vinken, P J and Bruyn, G W (eds.), Handbook of Clinical Neurology Vol 4, North-Holland, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

kırıklar, bulanıklıklar, sınırlar ama nerde ötesi? | Cracks, Blurs, Boundaries, but Beyond?

[this is the text i’ve heralded down before, i have heard this article from the blog of James Benedict Brown, who says he is working on "a PhD investigating the means, methods and motivations of collaborative and participative practices in architectural education"!! http://learningarchitecture.wordpress.com/]

Architectural Education after Schön: Cracks, Blurs, Boundaries and Beyond, Helena Webster (Oxford Brookes University, UK), Journal for Education in the Built Environment, Vol. 3, Issue 2, December 2008 pp. 63-74 (12)
(http://cebe.cf.ac.uk/jebe/pdf/HelenaWebster3(2).pdf __05.2009)

64> Arguably, over the last two decades or so, Donald Schön’s pedagogic ideas have become the dominant ‘theory of practice’ for all professional and vocational education (i.e. learning ‘for’ disciplinary practice rather than learning ‘about’ a discipline or subject). Indeed, the notion of the reflective practitioner is now so ubiquitous that Barnett wrote, without irony, “We’re all reflective practitioners now” (Barnett, 1992, p. 185).
This paper will attempt to demonstrate a number of ways in which Schön’s cognitive-based theories are severely limited by his inability to recognise their ‘partial’ or ‘limited’ nature. The aim is not so much to discredit Schön, but rather to point to the role that other theories of knowledge and learning might play in the development of an understanding of architectural learning and teaching.
According to Schön, this technical rationality resulted in a curriculum premised on the idea that students learnt a “body of theoretical knowledge…” and subsequently practice was “…the application of this knowledge in repeated and predictable ways to achieve defined ends” (Usher et al., 1997, p. 126). Schön criticised this notion of education, firstly because it denied the complexities of the problems that professionals faced in the real world and secondly because it failed to account for how professionals actually worked in practice. [this notion didn’t work, and was irrelevant to the real situtaion]
[here’s an account of what i like to call the "old studio":]
It seems somewhat fortuitous for the un-theorised field of architectural education that Schön used its core pedagogical tool, design studio learning, as a paradigm for all professional education. ... in the 1980s, architectural education had a relatively homogeneous ‘naturalised’ form that originated in the 19th century when the articled apprenticeship model (in which novices learnt to become architects through a mix of engaging in the work of an architectural office, observing and being coached by a master architect) was almost literally transferred into an educational setting. The dimensions of transfer might be summarised as follows:
_Pedagogic Space: the architectural office became the design studio.
_Pedagogic Tool: architectural design problems became simulated architectural design problems.
_Pedagogic Method: learning design artistry via coaching from the architect became learning design artistry via coaching from design tutors.
65> Schön asserted initially in The Reflective Practitioner (1983), again in the RIBA publication The Design Studio: An Exploration of its Traditions and Potential (1985) and yet again in the better known Educating the Reflective Practitioner (1987), that by reproducing the apprenticeship model, architectural education had successfully given precedence to professional ‘relevance’ over technical ‘rigour’ (1985, p. 15). ...
Thus, Schön defined ‘reflective practice’ as occurring when skilled practitioners responded tacitly to situations of uncertainty, instability, or uniqueness, through a combination of intuitive “knowing-in-action” (1987, p. 22), “reflection-in-action” (1987, p. 26) and “reflection-on-action” (1985, p. 74). ...
66> However, it could be argued that Schön’s singular focus on design studio learning results in an overly narrow description of architectural learning. Firstly, Schön fails to recognise that there are other cognitive, affective and corporeal dimensions to learning that take place both within the design studio and in other settings (the lecture theatre, the refectory, parties, etc.). Secondly, Schön fails to recognise that students experience architectural education as the sum of its explicit and hidden dimensions and it is this total experience that effects the development of students from novices to professional architects.
[following seems to give us a reason to consider education, in general, as a more diverse intellectual “strive”:]... throughout his early ‘archaeological’ writings, and particularly in Discipline and Punish, [Michel] Foucault repeatedly referred to educational institutions as sites par excellence for the creation of the modern (post-19th century) subject. Foucault’s archaeological writings attempted to ‘excavate’, through detailed archival work, the particular ways in which the new 19th century disciplines (medicine, law, prisons, and education) exercised power to effect the transformation of individuals into alignment with specific disciplinary norms and values. Foucault’s research identified a generic taxonomy of devices (‘surveillance’, ‘normalisation’ and ‘examination’), what Foucault called “micro-technologies of power”, through which the new disciplines exercised their disciplinary power (1991, pp. 170-194). Thus, Foucault suggested that schools, colleges and universities, as examples of the new 19th century institutions of power, employed disciplinary specific ‘micro-technologies of power’ to transform students from one state to another. Subsequently, several historians of education have explored the character of these micro-technologies in more detail. For instance, Jones and Williamson explored the spatialisation of power in classrooms (1979, p. 59) and Hoskin and Macve explored the examination as a means of objectively evaluating and categorising pupils according to ability (1986). By extension, it seems entirely plausible to conceive of contemporary architectural education as a set of ‘micro-technologies of power’ (regulations, exams, timetables, spatial organisations, pedagogic encounters, etc.) that effectively ‘discipline’ students into ‘becoming’ architects. An additional tenet of Foucault’s argument was that ‘micro-technologies of power’ work to transform the whole person i.e. both the mind and the body (1991, p. 138). Thus, it follows that architectural education might be understood as a set of ‘micro-technologies of power’ that alter the cognitive, affective and corporeal dimensions of students towards disciplinary norms.
67> Schön’s research looks at architectural education through a very narrow lens, yet somehow he feels able to derive grand theories of learning from the results. [schön, you’re fine, you’re nice, but do not stretch your arms over education!] Most design tutors have taught students who believe that they can succeed merely by following their tutor’s weekly instructions. This is often a frustrating experience for tutors because they know, and repeatedly tell students, that engaging with formal teaching in a strategic manner is not sufficient to ensure successful progression through architectural education. Indeed, a recent study that investigated students’ approaches to learning revealed that poorly performing students tended to take a strategic approach to learning whilst high performing students understood architectural learning as a more diverse activity involving informal as well as formal learning (Webster, 2005 & 2007). This latter group of students described how they had thrown themselves into the world of architecture by, for instance, reading expansively, visiting cities, buildings and exhibitions, attending lectures, spending long hours in studio, and living in houses with other architectural students. In effect, it appears that students who take a deep approach to learning by fully engaging with the world of architecture appear to gain an understanding of the culture of the discipline, including the tricky notion of aesthetics, and thereby establish a kind of ‘feeling for the game’. [so where has that foucaultean critic gone? how is acculturation through micro-politics overcome when we step outside the institutions? we take a leave, but reach out to the ‘instituted culture’, and gain the ‘feeling for the game’ anyhow!?:]
The twin notions that all people learn all the time, not just in educational settings, and that learning is inescapably ‘situated’ in real settings were put forward in the 1990s by Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger. In their seminal book Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991) [back to the “lonca”, back to apprenticeship, back to recreating the current verbatim, back to unchanging medieval ages:] Lave and Wenger drew on ethnographic studies of craftsmen apprentices to outline the ways in which formal and informal learning work to allow, or disallow, novices to move from the periphery (unskilled/un-acculturated) to the centre of a community (skilled/acculturated). Etienne Wenger subsequently suggested that educational experiences could be designed to facilitate the acceptance of novices into a particular disciplinary community (Legitimate Peripheral Participation) and effect their transition, via formal and informal learning, towards full membership of the community (1998, p. 263).
68>... in his long explication of students’ encounters with design tutors Schön suggests that the role of the design tutor is to ‘correct’ students’ designs. [this is what we try to leave behind, but we never intend to overcome the following:]
Why is it we enter [architecture school] with incredibly diverse backgrounds, interests and friends and we leave here with the exact same handwriting, muttering a language that prevents normal communication and exchange with almost anyone outside of our future profession – and we like it this way…? (cited in Anthony, 1990, p. 38)
[apparently, she criticizes schön on the grounds shared by my elder colleagues in our institution:] It is undeniable, although rarely talked about, that architectural education has a powerful ‘hidden curriculum’ that socialises and acculturates students into the values (particularly aesthetic, motivational and ethical values) and practices (including language, deportment and dress) of the discipline (Dutton, 1991, p. 167). Yet Schön’s theories fail to acknowledge the existence, let alone the importance, of the affective and the corporeal domains of architectural learning.
[so the story goes towards the students’ individuality, through bourdieu’s concept of habitus: “to re-conceptualize the student as an individual with a distinct habitus.” individualism is fine. but seems not to be rich enough a concept to understand and reconceptualize the current conditions and the studio... nonetheless, i claim that the following has already happened in our institution:]
69> In recent years phenomenological and ethnographic type research has provided evidence that transmission teaching is not an [70>] effective way to inculcate learning (Prosser & Trigwell, 1999). Subsequently, new theories of student learning that focus on what the student does rather than what the tutor does have gained popularity in higher education (Ramsden, 2003, pp. 14-19; Biggs, 2003, p. 12). These theories propose a new model for the teacher as ‘facilitator’, ‘critical friend,’ or ‘liminal servant’ (Webster, 2004b, p. 10). In light of the above, it is clear that Schön’s conception of the way students learn in a tutorial situation is in urgent need of revision.
[creativity comes into prominence:] Clearly, reflection has an important role in designing. However, it is only one part of the design process. It might be more fruitful for architectural educators interested in understanding more about the performative act of designing to consult theories of innovation and creativity because they provide more rounded and nuanced models of the design process (Cropley, 2001; Lawson; 2005).
[an implicit conflict occurs in this text, and in our minds, where post-modernist tendencies to devalue all pre-established knowledge or truth claims, and legitimacy of hierarchical social constructs constantly clash, with still implicitly assumed boundaries of a discipline, we have been moving, gradually, from the caricature technocrat of schön, through schön’s master, and we came here, and while we are opening the boundaries of disciplines, more and more, towards vagueness, we still like it to assume presence of a disciplinary practice, which is nevertheless learned, if not taught; but in more and more ambiguous ways...] [follows a further critic of the behavior of the former tutor/master (namely, Mr. Quist), institutional habitus versus creating of a personal habitus:]
So, if one accepts that professional knowledge is both ‘constructed’ and ‘contested’ both between and within groups it seems very odd that Donald Schön continually presents architectural knowledge as unproblematic (as opposed to ‘contested’ and ‘contestable’).
71> It is Schön’s enlightenment view of knowledge as ‘truth’ that allows him to present Mr Quist’s habitus as a paradigm of the architectural habitus (Schön, 1985, pp. 32-52). According to Schön, all the student Petra has to do to become an architect is to learn to be like Mr Quist: white, male and middle class! In Schön’s model of learning there seems no possibility that Petra ‘could’ or ‘should’ be critically constructing her own architectural habitus or that her habitus might or might not differ radically from her tutor’s habitus. Further, Schön fails to recognise that Quist, as a representative of a particular institutional habitus, uses his power to direct Petra’s learning towards alignment with his normative habitus. The tutorial interaction Schön describes is a prime example of the primacy of structure over agency i.e. Quist provides little room for Petra to act independently or make her own choices. [this is a continuing conflict, also hereabouts:] Along with other apologists for the naturalised model of architectural education Schön puts forward design studio learning as a paradigm for liberal self-development. However, recent primary research on design studio learning has painted a picture of tight control, coercion and molding (Dutton, 1991, p. 167; Stevens, 2002, p. 187). [this article indicates some of the problems, but the proposals seem to me to be quite “light”]

düşünceli meslek ehli | the reflective practicioner

[here’s a famous book, first of a series. this one (schön, 1983) is about the conditions of several practices, including architecture. i’ve heard that the following texts (schön 1985, 1987) focus more on education, and taking architectural studio education as epitomizing this new approach to professional practices. the main argument seems to be: the practitioner tacitly knows, he/she is constantly reflecting in-and-on his/her actions, during professional practice, thus, studio education, where the tutor and the student together reflect, while acting, on exemplary problems is the appropriate style of professional education, rather than passive teaching-learning... but for now i will only focus on the first four chapters of the first book, which seems to be capturing something, though at the expense of major simplifications. this never means that i will accept this kind of professional practice or corresponding education as “fine” just because they seem to be “given” this way. indeed schön’s advises about education are examples of the style of education that we had faced when we were students more than ten years ago, and which we try to leave behind now; and to an extent, this leaving behind already happened in 3400, and this new studio is the focus of my critical archaeology. cause this new one doesn’t seem to me to be convincing either. right above i will cite an article, though not much subtle, still exemplifies some objections against schön’s conception.]

The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action
Schön, Donald A., Basic books, 1983

contents
Part I: PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN ACTION
1 The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge >3
2 From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action >21
Part II: PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS FOR REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
3 Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation Psychotherapy: The Patient as a Universe of One >105
4 The Structure of Reflection-in-Action >128
5 Reflective Practice in the Science-Based Professions >168
7 Town Planning: Limits to Reflection-in-Action >204
8 The Art of Managing: Reflection-in-Action Within an Organizational Learning System >236
g Patterns and Limits of Reflection-in-Action Across the Professions >267
Part III: CONCLUSION
10 Implications for the Professions and Their Place in Society >287

Part I PROFESSIONAL KNOWLEDGE AND REFLECTION-IN ACTION
1 The Crisis of Confidence in Professional Knowledge
3> the professions have become essential to the very functioning of our society.
[teknokrasi:] In all of these functions we honor what Everett Hughes has called "the professions' claim to extraordinary knowledge in matters of great social importance"; and in return, we grant professionals extraordinary rights and privileges. Hence, professional careers are among the most coveted and remunerative, and there are few occupations that have failed to seek out professional status. As one author asked, are we seeing the professionalization of nearly everyone? But although we are wholly dependent on them, there are increasing signs of a crisis of confidence in the professions. Not only have we witnessed well-publicized scandals in which highly esteemed professionals have misused their autonomy— where doctors and lawyers, for example, have used their positions illegitimately for private gain—but we are also encountering visible failures of professional action. Professionally designed solutions to public problems have had unanticipated consequences, sometimes worse than the problems they were designed to solve.[though he is going to criticize the technical rationality, he nevertheless preserves this view form the ideology of the nation-state, hence argues over the benefits of the unified nation-state] Newly invented technologies, professionally conceived and evaluated, have turned out to produce unintended side effects unacceptable to large segments of our society. A professionally conceived and managed war has been widely perceived as a national disaster. Professionals themselves have delivered widely disparate and conflicting recommendations concerning problems of national importance, including those to which professional activities have contributed.
[it's understood that mere technological knowledge by itself isn't equal to, true, good, well:] As a result, there has been a disposition to blame the professions for their failures and a loss of faith in professional judgment. There have been strident public calls for external regulation of professional activity, efforts to create public [4>] organizations to protest and protect against professionally recommended policies, and appeals to the courts for recourse against professional incompetence. Even in the most hallowed professional schools of medicine and law, rebellious students have written popular exposes of the amoral, irrelevant, or coercive aspects of professional education. This skepticism has taken several forms. [against simplistic liberal or positivistic stances a call for an ethical concern:] In addition to the public loss of confidence noted above, there has been a virulent ideological attack on the professions, mostly from the Left. Some critics, like Ivan Illich, have engaged in a wholesale debunking of professional claims to special expertise. ['cause, apparently, by virtue of their very constitutions, professions tend to be aligned to the capital:] Others have tried to show that professionals misappropriate specialized knowledge in their own interests and the interest of a power elite intent on preserving its dominance over the rest of the society. Finally, and most significantly, professionals themselves have shown signs recently of a loss of confidence in their claims to extraordinary knowledge.
14> Let us consider, then, how the crisis of confidence in the professions has been interpreted by professionals who have given serious thought in their own fields to the adequacy of professional knowledge. [yet, even the liberals and capitalists are unhappy:] On the whole, their assessment is that professional knowledge is mismatched to the changing character of the situations of practice—the complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts which are increasingly perceived as central to the world of professional practice. The dean of a major school of management speaks of the inadequacy of established management theory and technique to deal with the increasingly critical task of "managing complexity." [dr. william pownes, former dean of the albert einstein school of management, private communication to the author] The dean of a famous school of engineering observes that the nineteenth-century division of labor has become obsolete. Professionals are called upon to perform tasks for which they have not been educated, and [15>] "the niche no longer fits the education, or the education no longer fits the niche." [dr. harvey brooks, former dean of the harvard university school for applied physics, private communication to the author]
“unprecedented requirement for adaptability”: The dilemma of the professional today lies in the fact that both ends of the gap he is expected to bridge with his profession are changing so rapidly; the body of knowledge that he must use and the expectations of the society that he must serve. [harvey brooks, “the dilemmas of engineering education,” IEEE spectrum (February 1967):89]
The role of the physician will be continually reshaped, over the next decades, by the reorganization and rationalization of medical care; the proliferating roles of enterprise will call for a redefinition of the businessman's role; and architects will have to function in radically new ways as a consequence of the introduction of new building technologies, new patterns of real estate and land development, and new techniques of information processing in design. As the tasks change, so will the demands for usable knowledge, and the patterns of task and knowledge lire inherently unstable.
16> Russell Ackoff, one of the founders of the field of operations research, has recently announced to his colleagues that "the future of operations research is past" because managers are not confronted with problems that are independent of each other, but with dynamic situations that consist of complex systems of changing problems that interact with each other. I call such situations messes. [go look at OMA and MVRDV and all the like:] Problems are abstractions extracted from messes by analysis; they are to messes as atoms are to tables and charts . . . Managers do not solve problems: they manage messes.
17> Practitioners are frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests. Teachers are faced with pressures for increased efficiency in the context of contracting budgets, demands that they rigorously "teach the basics," exhortations to encourage creativity, build citizenship, help students examine their values.
18> In sum, when leading professionals write or speak about their own crisis of confidence, they tend to focus on the mismatch of traditional patterns of practice and knowledge to features of the practice situation—complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict—of whose importance they are becoming increasingly aware. ... If it is true that professional practice has at least as much to do with finding the problem as with solving the problem found, it is also true that problem setting is a recognized professional activity. Some physicians reveal skills in finding the problems of particular patients in ways that go beyond the conventional boundaries of medical diagnosis. Some engineers, policy analysts, and operations researchers have become skilled at reducing "messes" to manageable plans. For some administrators, the need to "find the right problem" has become a conscious principle of action.
2 From Technical Rationality to Reflection-in-Action
21>[time for an archaeology, in order to break away from it:] the dominant epistemology of practice:
according to the model of technical rationalitythe view of professional knowledge which has most powerfully shaped both our thinking about the professions and the institutional relations of research, education, and practice –professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique.
30> The Origins of Technical Rationality:
It is striking that the dominant model of professional knowledge seems to its proponents to require very little justification. How comes it that in the second half of the twentieth century we find in our universities, embedded not only in men's minds but in the institutions themselves, a dominant view of professional knowledge as the application of scientific theory and technique to the instrumental problems of practice?
31>The answer to this question lies in the last three hundred years of the history of Western ideas and institutions. Technical rationality is the heritage of Positivism, the powerful philosophical doctrine that grew up in the nineteenth century as an account of the rise of science and technology and as a social movement aimed at applying the achievements of science and technology to the well-being of mankind. Technical Rational¬ly is the Positivist epistemology of practice. It became institutionalized in the modern university, founded in the late nineteenth century when Positivism was at its height, and in the professional schools which secured their place in the university in the early decades of the twentieth century. Because excellent accounts of this story exist elsewhere, I shall only touch on its main points here. Since the Reformation, the history of the West has been limped by the rise of science and technology and by the industrial movement which was both cause and consequence of the Increasingly powerful scientific world-view. As the scientific worldview gained dominance, so did the idea that human progress would be achieved by harnessing science to create technology for the achievement of human ends. This Technological Program, which was first vividly expressed in the writings of Bacon and Hobbes, became a major theme for the philosophers of the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century, and by the late nineteenth century had been firmly established as a pillar of conventional wisdom. By this time, too, the professions had come to be seen as vehicles for the application of the new sciences to the achievement of human progress. The engineers, closely tied to the development of industrial technology, became a model of technical practice for the other professions. Medicine, a learned profession with origins in the medieval universities, was refashioned in the new image of a science-based technique for the preservation of health. And
39> Between 1963 and 1982, however, both the general public and the professionals have become increasingly aware of the flaws and limitations of the professions. As I have pointed out in chapter 1, the professions have suffered a crisis of legitimacy rooted both in their perceived failure to live up to their own norms and in their perceived incapacity to help society achieve its objectives and solve its problems. Increasingly we have become aware of the importance to actual practice of phenomena—complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value-conflict—which do not fit the model of Technical Rationality. Now, in the light of the Positivist origins of Technical Rationality, we can more readily see why these phenomena are so troublesome. From the perspective of Technical Rationality, professional practice is a process of problem solving. Problems of choice [40>] or decision are solved through the selection, from available means, of the one best suited to established ends. But with this emphasis on problem solving, we ignore problem setting, the process by which we define the decision to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen. In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations which are puzzling, troubling, and uncertain. In order to convert a problematic situation to a problem, a practitioner must do a certain kind of work. He must make sense of an uncertain situation that initially makes no sense. When professionals consider what road to build, for example, they deal usually with a complex and ill-defined situation in which geographic, topological, financial, economic, and political issues are all mixed up together. Once they have somehow decided what road to build and go on to consider how best to build it, they may have a problem they can solve by the application of available techniques; but when the road they have built leads unexpectedly to the destruction of a neighbor-hood, they may find themselves again in a situation of uncertainty. It is this sort of situation that professionals are coming increasingly to see as central to their practice. They are coming to recognize that although problem setting is a necessary condition for technical problem solving, it is not itself a technical problem. When we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the "things" of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence which allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation needs to be changed. [::how the importance of our constant problem setting behavior understood] Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them.
43> During world war II , operations research grew out of the successful use of applied mathematics in submarine search and bomb tracking. After World War II, the development of the digital computer sparked widespread interest in formal, quantitative, computerized models which seemed to offer a new technique for converting “soft” problems into “hard” ones. A new breed of technical practitioner came into being. Systems analysts, management scientists, policy analysts, began to use formal modelling techniques on problems of inventory control, business policy, information retrieval, transportation planning, urban land use, the delivery of medical care, the criminal justice system, and the control of the economy. By the late 1960s, there was scarcely a described problem for which someone had not constructed a computerized model. But in recent years: [44>] there has been a widening consensus, even among formal modellers, that the early hopes were greatly inflated. Formal models have been usefully employed to solve problems in such relatively undemanding areas as inventory control and logistics. They have generally failed to yield effective results in the more complex, less clearly defined problems of business management, housing policy, or criminal justice.
Formal modellers have responded to this unpleasant discovery in several different ways. Some have continued to ply their trade in the less demanding areas of the field. Some have abandoned their original training in order to address themselves to real-world problems. Others have decided to treat formal models as "probes" or "metaphors" useful only as sources of new perspectives on complex situations. But for the most part, the use of formal models has proceeded as though it had a life of its own. Driven by the evolving questions of theory and technique, formal modelling has become increasingly divergent from the real-world problems of practice. And practitioners who choose to remain on the high ground have continued In use formal models for complex problems, quite oblivious to the troubles incurred whenever a serious attempt is made to implement them.
45> Thus an industrial engineer may simplify the actual arrangement of a manufacturing system in order to make it easier to analyze; or, more ominously, members of the helping professions may get rid of clients who resist professional help, relegating them to such categories as "problem tenant" or "rebellious child." All such strategies carry a danger of misreading situations, or manipulating them, to serve the practitioner's interest in maintaining his confidence in his standard models and techniques. When people are involved in the situation, the practitioner may preserve his sense of expertise at his clients' expense. [:: sounds familiar, who's the client, fiction of whole society? [public/kamu] or the investor?] Some students of the professions have tried to take account of the limitations of technical expertise and have proposed new approaches to the predicament of professional knowledge. Among these are Edgar Schein and Nathan Glazer, whom I have already mentioned, and Herbert Simon, whose The Sciences of the Artificial has aroused a great deal of interest in professional circles. Each of these writers has identified a gap between professional knowledge and the demands of real-world practice. Their formulations of the gap are intriguingly different yet they reveal an important underlying similarity.
46> It is Simon, however, who most clearly links the predicament of professional knowledge to the historical origins of the Positivist epistemology of practice. Simon believes that all professional practice is centrally concerned with what he calls "design," that is, with the process of "changing existing situations into preferred ones." But design in this sense is precisely what the professional schools do not teach. The older schools have a knowledge of design that is "intellectually soft, intuitive, informal and cookbooky," [herbert simon, the sciences of the artificial (cambridge, mass:: MIT press, 1972)p55] and the newer ones, more absorbed into the general culture of the modern university, have become schools of natural science. Thus, [47>] ... Both older and newer schools have "nearly abdicated responsibility for training in the core professional skill," in large part because such training would have to be grounded in a science of design which does not yet exist. Simon proposes to build a science of design by emulating and extending the optimization methods which have been developed in statistical decision theory and management science. An optimization problem is a well-formed problem of the following kind:
A list of foods is provided, the command variables being quantities of the various foods that are to be included in the diet. The environmental parameters are the prices and nutritional contents (calories, vitamins, minerals, and so on) of each of the foods. The utility function is the cost (with a minus sign attached) of the diet, subject to the constraints, say, that it not contain more than 2000 calories per day, that it meet specified minimum needs for vitamins and minerals, and that rutabaga not be eaten more than once a week . . . The problem is to select the quantities of foods that will meet the nutritional requirements and side conditions at the given prices for the lowest cost.
Here, ends have been converted to "constraints" and "utility functions"; means, to "command variables"; and laws, to "environmental parameters." Once problems are well formed in this way, they can be solved by a calculus of decision. As we have seen, however, well-formed instrumental problems are not given but must be constructed from messy problematic situations. Although Simon proposes to fill the gap between natural science and design practice with a science of design, his science can be applied only to well-formed problems already extracted from situations of practice.
49> Let us then reconsider the question of professional knowledge; let us stand the question on its head. If the model of Technical Rationality is incomplete, in that it fails to account for practical competence in "divergent" situations, so much the worse for the model. Let us search, instead, for an epistemology of practice implicit in the artistic, intuitive processes which some practitioners do bring to situations of uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict.
Reflection-in action:
50> Knowing in action. Once we put aside the model of Technical Rationality, which leads us to think of intelligent practice as an application of knowledge to instrumental decisions, there is nothing strange about the idea that a kind of knowing is inherent in intelligent action. Common sense admits the category of know-how, and it does not stretch common sense very much to say that the know-how is in the action...
51> There is nothing in common sense to make us say that know-how consists in rules or plans which we entertain in the mind prior to action. [and this is what happened hereabouts, in our studios]
52> Michael Polanyi, who invented the phrase "tacit knowing," draws examples from the recognition of faces and the use of tools.
53> ... whenever a bad one was made, it was recognized as such, and therefore not repeated. The introduction of aniline dyes disrupted the cultural process of design, for the shawl-makers could not produce wholly new designs of high quality; they could only recognize "bad fit" within a familiar pattern. Ruminating on Alexander's example, Geoffrey Vickers points out that it is not only artistic judgments which are based on a sense of form which cannot be fully articulated:
... artists, so far from being alone in this, exhibit most clearly an oddity which is present in all such judgments. We can recognize and describe deviations from a norm very much more clearly than we can describe the norm itself. [so no need to teach, explicitly, a pre-established norm or some definite technical knowledge or well-defined methods, but those will be implicitly gained/produced through practice, and, as it seems, this insight turned out to be true!]
For Vickers, it is through such tacit norms that all of us make the judgments, the qualitative appreciations of situations, on which our practical competence depends. Psycholinguists have noted that we speak in conformity with rules of phonology and syntax which most of us cannot describe. Alfred Schultz and his intellectual descendants have analyzed the tacit, everyday know-how that we bring to social interactions such as the rituals of greeting, ending a meeting, or standing in a crowded elevator. Birdwhistell has made comparable contributions to a description of the tacit knowledge embodied in our use and recognition of movement and gesture. In these domains, too, we behave according to rules [54>] In examples like these, knowing has the following properties:
_There are actions, recognitions, and judgments which we know how to carry out spontaneously; we do not have to think about them prior to or during their performance.
_We are often unaware of having learned to do these things; we simply find ourselves doing them.
_In some cases, we were once aware of the understandings which were subsequently internalized in our feeling for the stuff of action. In other cases, we may never have been aware of them. In both cases, however, we are usually unable to describe the knowing which our action reveals. ... Reflecting-in-action. If common sense recognizes knowing-in-action, it also recognizes that we sometimes think about what we are doing. Phrases like "thinking on your feet," "keeping your wits about you," and "learning by doing" suggest not only that we can think about doing but that we can think about doing something while doing it. Some of the most interesting examples of this process occur in the midst of a performance.
55> [practitioner is like a jazz improviser:] When you "study those winning habits," you are thinking about the know-how that has enabled you to win. The pitchers seem to be talking about a kind of reflection on their patterns of action, on the situations in which they are performing, and on the know-how implicit in their performance. They are reflecting on action and, in some cases, reflecting in action.
60> This is suggested by the way in which professionals use the word "case"—or project, account, commission, or deal, depending on the profession. All such terms denote the units which make up a practice, and they denote types of family-resembling examples. [italics, my emphasis] Thus a physician may encounter many different "cases of measles"; a lawyer, many different "cases of libel." As a practitioner experiences many variations of a small number of types of cases, he is able to "practice" his practice. He develops a repertoire of expectations, images, and techniques. He learns what to look for and how to respond to what he finds. As long as his practice is stable, in the sense that it brings him the same types of cases, he becomes less and less subject to surprise. His knowing-in-practice tends to become increasingly tacit, spontaneous, and automatic, thereby conferring upon him and his clients the benefits of specialization. On the other hand, professional specialization can have negative effects. In the individual, a high degree of specialization can lead to a parochial narrowness of vision. [and this narrowness eventuates in ethical and political losses]
61> Thus people sometimes yearn for the general practitioner of earlier days, who is thought to have concerned himself with the "whole patient," and they sometimes accuse contemporary specialists of treating particular illnesses in isolation from the rest of the patient's life experience. Further, as a practice becomes more repetitive and routine, and as knowing-in-practice becomes increasingly tacit and spontaneous, the practitioner may miss important opportunities to think about what he is doing.
68> In examples such as these, something falls outside the range of ordinary expectations. The banker has a feeling that something is wrong, though he cannot at first say what it is. The physician sees an odd combination of diseases never before described in a medical text. Tolstoy thinks of each of his pupils as an individual with ways of learning and imperfections peculiar to himself. The teachers are astonished by the sense behind a student's mistake. In each instance, the practitioner allows himself to experience surprise, puzzlement, or confusion in a situation which he finds uncertain or unique. He reflects on the phenomena before him, and on the prior understandings which have been implicit in his behavior. He carries out an experiment which serves to generate both a new understanding of the phenomena and a change in the situation.
Part II PROFESSIONAL CONTEXTS FOR REFLECTION-IN-ACTION
3 Design as a Reflective Conversation with the Situation
78> In the following pages, I shall draw from a particular example a description of designing which underlies the differences among schools and suggests a generic process shared by the various design professions. I shall consider designing as a conversation with the materials of a situation.
79> [back-talk:] Typically, his making process is complex. There are more variables—kinds of possible moves, norms, and interrelationships of these—than can be represented in a finite model. Because of this complexity, the designer's moves tend, happily or unhappily, to produce consequences other than those intended. When this happens, the designer may take account of the unintended changes he has made in the situation by forming new appreciations and under¬standings and by making new moves. He shapes the situation, in accordance with his initial appreciation of it, the situation "talks back," and he responds to the situation's back-talk. [morals back again, the good type:] In a good process of design, this conversation with the situation is reflective. In answer to the situation's back-talk, the designer reflects-in-action on the construction of the problem, the strategies of action, or the model of the phenomena, which have been implicit in his moves.
94> Quist plays out the consequences of the new discipline by carving the geometry into the slope. In the medium of sketch and spatial-action language, he represents buildings on the site through moves which are also experiments. Each move has consequences described and evaluated in terms drawn from one or more design domains. Each has implications binding on later moves. And each creates new problems to be described and solved. Quist designs by spinning out a web of moves, consequences, implications, appreciations, and further moves. ... Each move is a local experiment which contributes to the global experiment of reframing the problem. ... Thus the global experiment in reframing the problem is also [95>] a reflective conversation with the situation in which Quist comes to appreciate and then to develop the implications of a new whole idea. ... Three dimensions of this process are particularly noteworthy: the domains of language in which the designer describes and appreciates the consequences of his moves, the implications he discovers and follows, and his changing stance toward the situation with which he converses.
Design domains. Quist makes his moves in a language of designing which combines drawing and speaking. In this language, words have different roles. When Quist speaks of a cafeteria that could "come down into here to get summer sun here," "an upper level [which could] drop down two ways," "steps to relate in downward," he uses spatial action language. He attributes actions to elements of the design as though they were creating form and organizing space. At the same time, he anticipates the experienced felt-path4 of a user of the building who could find that the upper level drops down or that the steps relate in downwards. Quist also uses words to name elements of the design ("steps," a "wall," an "administration"), to describe the consequences and implications of moves and to reappreciate the situation.
Elements of the language of designing can be grouped into clusters, of which I have identified twelve. [there's a figure 3.2 here] These design domains contain the names of elements, features, relations, and actions, and of norms used to evaluate problems ... [100>] At some point, he must move from a "what if?" to a decision which then becomes a design node with binding implications for further moves. Thus there is a continually evolving system of implications within which the designer reflects-in-action. ... Moves also lead to the apprehension of new problems such as the treatment of the "precincts" which flow out from the nooks, and they lead to new potentials for the creation of desirable artifacts such as the softening of the hard-edged shape of the cafeteria by allowing it to "come down into here to get summer sun here and winter sun here."
101> His materials are continually talking back to him, causing him to apprehend unanticipated problems and potentials. As he appreciates such new and unexpected phenomena, he also evaluates the moves that have created them.
The Underlying Process of Reflection-in-Action
102> Petra's problem solving has led her to a dead end. Quist reflects critically on the main problem she has set, reframes it, and proceeds to work out the consequences of the new geometry he has imposed on the screwy site. The ensuing inquiry is a global experiment, a reflection-in-action on the restructured problem. Quist spins out a web of moves, subjecting each cluster of moves to multiple evaluations drawn from his repertoire of design domains. As he does so, he shifts from embracing freedom of choice to acceptance of implications, from involvement in the local units to a distanced consideration of the resulting whole, and from a stance of tentative exploration to one of commitment. He discovers in the situation's back-talk a whole new idea which generates a system of implications for further moves.
The Structure of Reflection-in-Action
129> In both examples, the practitioner approaches the practice problem as a unique case. He does not act as though he had no relevant prior experiences; on the contrary. But he attends to the peculiarities of the situation at hand. Quist pays attention to the special problem of this screwy site and the Supervisor, to the special problem of this frustrated patient. Neither one behaves as though he were looking for cues to a standard solution. Rather, each seeks to discover the particular features of his problematic situation, and from their gradual discovery, designs an intervention. In neither example is the problem given. Or rather, the student presents a problem that the teacher criticizes and rejects. The student has gotten stuck and does not know how to go further. The teacher, who attributes the student's predicament to his way of framing the problem, tries to make new sense of the problematic situation he is encountering at secondhand. The situation is complex and uncertain, and there is a problem in finding the problem.
These points of similarity create the conditions for reflection-in-action. Because each practitioner treats his case as unique, he cannot deal with it by applying standard theories or techniques. In the half hour or so that he spends with the student, he must construct an understanding of the situation as he finds it. And because he finds the situation problematic, he must reframe it.
The cases are similar in the further sense that in both architecture and psychiatry there are many competing views of the nature of the practice. There is controversy not only about the best way of solving specific problems, but about what problems [130>] are worth solving and what role the practitioner should play in their solution. I propose that by attending to the practitioner's reflection-in-action in both cases it is possible to discover a fundamental structure of professional inquiry which underlies the many varieties of design or therapy advocated by the contending schools of practice.
Finally, in each case the practitioner gives an artistic performance. He responds to the complexity, which confuses the student, in what seems like a simple, spontaneous way. His artistry is evident in his selective management of large amounts of information, his ability to spin out long lines of invention and inference, and his capacity to hold several ways of looking at things at once without disrupting the flow of inquiry.
It is the art of these practitioners that I shall compare and discuss in the following pages. Their art seems to me to be, in considerable measure, a kind of reflection-in-action. In spite of the very great differences between their two cases, Quist and the Supervisor engage in a process whose underlying structure is the same: a reflective conversation with a unique and uncertain situation.
132> In this reflective conversation, the practitioner's effort to solve the retrained problem yields new discoveries which call for new reflection-in-action. The process spirals through stages of appreciation, action, and reappreciation. The unique and uncertain situation comes to be understood through the attempt to change it, and changed through the attempt to understand it.
134> Although a problem-setting experiment cannot be judged in terms of its effectiveness, the practitioner tries nevertheless to set a problem he can solve. ... When the practitioner tries to solve the problem he has set, he seeks both to understand the situation and to change it. ... The practitioner's moves produce some unintended effects. [135>] The practitioner evaluates his problem-setting experiment by determining whether he likes these unintended changes, or likes what he can make of them. ... In these instances, the practitioner affirms his reframing of the problem, because he values the unintended changes he has made and discovered. ... The evaluation of the frame experiment is grounded in the practitioner's appreciative system. Through the unintended effects of action, the situation talks back. The practitioner, reflecting on this back-talk, may find new meanings in the situation which lead him to a new reframing.
136> Thus the practitioner evaluates his experiment in reframing the problematic situation not only by his ability to solve the new problem he has set but by his appreciations of the unintended effects of action, and especially by his ability, in conversation with the situation, to make an artifact that is coherent and an idea that is understandable. But the achievement of coherence does not put an end to inquiry. On the contrary, the practitioner also evaluates his reframing by its ability, in Erikson's phrase, to keep inquiry moving. ... A successful reframing of the problematic situation leads to a continuation of the reflective conversation.
138> how can an inquirer use what he already knows in a situation which he takes to be unique? He cannot apply a rule drawn from past experience, like the rule Quist gives for uses appropriate to slopes of various grades; for he would then ignore the uniqueness of the situation, treating it as an instance of a class of familiar things. Nor does he invent a new description out of whole cloth, without any reference to what he already knows. It is clear that Quist and the Supervisor use a great deal of their experience and knowledge, and it is far from clear what might be meant by the spontaneous generation of a description.
What I want to propose is this: The practitioner has built up a repertoire of examples, images, understandings, and actions. Quist's repertoire ranges across the design domains. It includes sites he has seen, buildings he has known, design problems he has encountered, and solutions he has devised for them. The Supervisor's repertoire includes patients he has seen or read about, types of stories he has heard and psychodynamic patterns associated with them, interventions he has tried, and patients' responses to them. A practitioner's repertoire includes the whole of his experience insofar as it is accessible to him for understanding and action.
When a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or—in Thomas Kuhn's phrase—an exemplar for the unfamiliar one. Kuhn's description of the functioning of exemplars in scientific problem solving is apposite here:
139> Just as he is unable at first to articulate the relevant similarities and differences of the problems, so he is unable at first to articulate the similarities and differences of his problem-solving procedures. Indeed, the whole process of seeing-as and doing-as may proceed without conscious articulation.
140> It is our capacity to see unfamiliar situations as familiar ones, and to do in the former as we have done in the latter, that enables us to bring our past experience to bear on the unique case. It is our capacity to see-as and do-as that allows us to have a feel for problems that do not fit existing rules.
The artistry of a practitioner like Quist hinges on the range and variety of the repertoire that he brings to unfamiliar situations. Because he is able to see these as elements of his repertoire, he is able to make sense of their uniqueness and need not reduce them to instances of standard categories. Moreover, each new experience of reflection-in-action enriches his repertoire. Petra's case may function as an exemplar for new situations. Reflection-in-action in a unique case may be generalized to other cases, not by giving rise to general principles, but by contributing to the practitioner's repertoire of exemplary themes from which, in the subsequent cases of his practice, he may compose new variations.
141> But in what sense is this really experimenting? The question arises because there is another sense of experiment which is central to the model of professional knowledge as technical rationality, one which Quist and the Supervisor, in their inquiries, do not seem to exemplify at all. In this sense, experimenting is an activity by which a researcher confirms or refutes a hypothesis. Its logic is roughly as follows.
143> The method of experimental hypothesis testing follows a process of elimination. The experimenter tries to produce conditions that disconfirm each of the competing hypotheses, by showing that the conditions that would follow from each hypothesis are not the observed ones. As Karl Popper has put it, the experimenter conducts a competition among hypotheses, rather like a horse race. ... In order to stage such a competition of hypotheses, employing Mill's Methods of Agreement and Difference (or Concomitant Variations), the experimenter must be able to achieve selective variation of the factors named by the competing hypotheses.
144> Under conditions of everyday professional practice the norms of controlled experiment are achievable only in a very limited way. The practitioner is usually unable to shield his experiments from the effects of confounding changes in the environment. The practice situation often changes rapidly, and may change out from under the experiment. Variables are often locked into one another, so that the inquirer cannot separate them. The practice situation is often uncertain, in the sense that one doesn't know what the variables are. And the very act of experimenting is often risky. Hence, according to the model of Technical Rationality, emphasis is placed on the separation of research from practice. On this view, practice should be based on scientific theory achievable only through controlled experiment, which cannot be conducted rigorously in practice. So to researchers and the research setting falls the development of basic and applied science, while to practitioners and the practice setting falls the
145> use of scientific theories to achieve the instrumental goals of practice. On this view, reflection-in-action is not really experiment. In what, then, does the experimenting of Quist and the Supervisor consist? What is the logic of experimental inference which they employ? In what sense, if any, is their experimenting rigorous? Let us step back to consider what experimenting means. I want to show that hypothesis-testing experiment is only one of several kinds of experiment, each of which has its own logic and its own criteria of success and failure. Because in practice these several kinds of experiment are mixed up together, experiment in practice is of a different order than experiment in the context of research. In the most generic sense, to experiment is to act in order to see what the action leads to. The most fundamental experimental question is, "What if?" [generate and test] When action is undertaken only to see what follows, without accompanying predictions or expectations, I shall call it exploratory experiment. This is much of what an infant does when he explores the world around him, what an artist does when he juxtaposes colors to see what effect they make, and what a newcomer does when he wanders around a strange neighborhood. It is also what a scientist often does when he first encounters and probes a strange substance to see how it will respond. Exploratory experiment is essential to the sort of science that does not appear in the scientific journals, because it has been screened out of the scientists' accounts of experimental results (perhaps because it does not conform to the norms of controlled experiment). Exploratory experiment is the probing, playful activity by which we get a feel for things. It succeeds when it leads to the discovery of something there.
146> ... we take action in order to produce an intended change. ... A parent gives his child a quarter to keep the child from crying. I shall call these move-testing experiments. ... A third kind of experimenting, hypothesis testing, I have already described. Hypothesis-testing experiment succeeds when it effects an intended discrimination among competing hypotheses.
148> In both cases, the global moves are affirmed. The practitioners' moves also function as exploratory probes of their situations. Their moves stimulate the situation's back-talk, which causes them to appreciate things in the situation that go beyond their initial perceptions of the problem.
149> The practitioner violates the canon of controlled experiment, which calls for objectivity and distance.
150> Their hypothesis-testing experiment is a game with the situation. They seek to make the situation conform to their hypothesis but remain open to the possibility that it will not. Thus their hypothesis-testing activity is neither self-fulfilling prophecy, which insures against the apprehension of disaffirming data, nor is it the neutral hypothesis testing of the method of controlled experiment, which calls for the experimenter to avoid influencing the object of study and to embrace disconfirming data. ... The inquirer's relation to this situation is transactional. 151> He shapes the situation, but in conversation with it, so that his own models and appreciations are also shaped by the situation. The phenomena that he seeks to understand are partly of his own making; he is in the situation that he seeks to understand. ... This fact has an important bearing on the practitioner's answer to the question, When should I stop experimenting? In the context of controlled experiment, given Popper's dictum, the experimenter might keep on experimenting indefinitely—as long as he is able to invent new, plausible hypotheses which might resist refutation more effectively than those he has already tried. But in practice situations like Quist's and the Supervisor's—where experimental action is also a move and a probe, where the inquirer's interest in changing the situation takes precedence over his interest in understanding it— hypothesis testing is bounded by appreciations. It is initiated by the perception of something troubling or promising, and it is terminated by the production of changes one finds on the whole satisfactory, or by the discovery of new features which give the situation new meaning and change the nature of the questions to be explored. Such events bring hypothesis testing to a close even when the inquirer has not exhausted his store of plausible alternative hypotheses.
157> Virtual Worlds:
The situations of Quist and the Supervisor are, in important ways, not the real thing. Quist is not moving dirt on the site. The Supervisor is not talking to the patient. Each is operating in a virtual world, a constructed representation of the real world of practice. 158> No move is irreversible. The designer can try, look, and by shifting to another sheet of paper, try again. 162> Virtual worlds are contexts for experiment within which practitioners can suspend or control some of the everyday impediments to rigorous reflection-in-action. They are representative worlds of practice in the double sense of "practice." And practice in the construction, maintenance, and use of virtual worlds develops the capacity for reflection-in-action which we call artistry.
Stance Toward Inquiry
163> A practitioner's stance toward inquiry is his attitude toward the reality with which he deals. According to the model of Technical Rationality, there is an objectively knowable world, independent of the practitioner's values and views. In order to gain technical knowledge of it, the practitioner must maintain a clear boundary between himself and his object of inquiry. In order to exert technical control over it, he must observe it and keep his distance from it—as Bacon said, commanding Nature by obeying her. His stance toward inquiry is that of spectator/manipulator.
In a practitioner's reflective conversation with a situation that he treats as unique and uncertain, he functions as an agent/experient. Through his transaction with the situation, he shapes it and makes himself a part of it. Hence, the sense he makes of the situation must include his own contribution to it. Yet he recognizes that the situation, having a life of its own distinct from his intentions, may foil his projects and reveal new meanings. From this paradoxical source derive the several features of a stance toward inquiry which are as necessary to reflection-in¬action as the norms of on-the-spot experiment and the uses of virtual worlds.
The inquirer must impose an order of his own, jumping rather than falling into his transaction with the situation. Thus the Supervisor tries to get the Resident to recognize his contribution to the patient's stalemate and to see in the transference a medium for inquiry and intervention. Thus Quist tries to get Petra to see that coherence does not exist in the site but must be imposed upon it by the designer. But the inquirer must also take responsibility for the order he imposes.
164> [flexibility:] At the same time that the inquirer tries to shape the situation to his frame, he must hold himself open to the situation's back-talk. He must be willing to enter into new confusions and uncertainties. Hence, he must adopt a kind of double vision. He must act in accordance with the view he has adopted, but he must recognize that he can always break it open later, indeed, must break it open later in order to make new sense of his transaction with the situation. This becomes more difficult to do as the process continues. His choices become more committing; his moves, more nearly irreversible. As the risk of uncertainty increases, so does the temptation to treat the view as the reality. Nevertheless, if the inquirer maintains his double vision, even while deepening his commitment to a chosen frame, he increases his chances of arriving at a deeper and broader coherence of artifact and idea.

[enough for now.]