31 Mayıs 2009 Pazar

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.]

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