With his book The Reflective Practitioner, first published in 1983, Donald Schön proposed his epistemology of practice (Schön, 1983:viii).
In 1987 followed Educating the Reflective Practitioner (Schön, 1987).
Schön (1930-1997) had a background in philosophy but worked for many years as a social scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Tech-nology (MIT) in Boston.
Schön published The Reflective Practitioner, for example in opposi-tion to what he described as long tradiopposi-tions of a “Positivist epistemo-logy of practice” of dividing theory and practice and prioritizing sci-entific knowledge above professional practice (ibid:viii). From what he saw, most universities were based on such assumptions. But basi-cally, Schön found the divide between the kind of knowledge honored in academia and the kind of competence valued in professional prac-tice puzzling.
He criticized the Positivist or ‘Technical Rationality’ tradition where general principles were valued higher than concrete problem-solving for (ibid:21-30). Technical Rationality captured the dominant prin-ciples in academia of prioritizing general prinprin-ciples derived from testable scientific and technical knowledge. With this, the academic scientific inquiry or practice increasingly has become what Schön called ‘a hypothetico-deductive system’, where hypotheses are tested through constrained experiments (ibid:33). Schön described hypothe-ses as ‘abstract models of an unseen world’, and for the experiments to be testable a lot of variables in real-world situations – like socio-techno-politico-economic issues – were left out.
Schön mentions Herbert Simon as one of the people who, with his proposition of a Science of Design, has tried to fill the gap between what Schön calls “the scientific basis of professional knowledge and the demands of real-world practice” (ibid:45). As Schön phrases it, “Si-mon believes that all professional practice is centrally concerned with what he calls ‘design’ – the process of ‘changing existing situations into preferred ones’…” – and here Schön somewhat agrees (ibid:46). How-ever, to Schön, Simon’s intension is still to preserve the ideals of tech-nical rationality, and to him Simon’s science of design can still only be applied to “...well-formed problems already extracted from situations of practice” (ibid:47). Simon’s science of design does not capture the complex, uncertain, unstable, unique situations of professional prac-tice, which Schön has observed and discusses in detail in his book.
Additionally, The Reflective Practitioner was published at a time when confidence in professional practice was declining both in the public
‘…Situation’ and ‘…Design Situation’
Starting my dissection, first I will capture how Schön views the ‘…situa-tions’ or ‘...design situa‘…situa-tions’ professionals like designers engage in.
To repeat from the box, Schön views situations of professional practice, not as ‘... problems to be solved, but (as) problematic situations characte-rized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy’ (Schön, 1983:15-16).
Additionally, throughout The Reflective Practitioner, Schön assigns and re-peats other adjectives to these problematic (design) situations. He for exam-ple calls them ‘... puzzling, troubling, and uncertain.’ (ibid:40); ‘.. comexam-plex, uncertain, unstable, unique..’ (ibid:14) and generally, he views situations as
‘unique events’ (ibid:16).
One of the five main studies explored in detail in The Reflective Practi-tioner, describes an example of an architectural tutoring-situation during which the student Petra shares her sketches and problems of designing a school with the studio master Quist (ibid:93). With these sketches and Petra’s verbal descriptions, in the situation at the table, Quist is demon-strating his process of designing to Petra. Another studied situation is from psychotherapy, in which a ‘supervisor’ and a student ‘resident’ are discuss-ing the resident’s counseldiscuss-ing with a frustrated patient, and in this situation the supervisor is also demonstrating his professional practice (ibid:118).
and among critical professionals themselves, as (scientifically trained) specialized professionals often caused larger problems than those they were intended to solve – for example through proposing tech-nical solutions e.g. in a greatly complex healthcare system. As Schön viewed it, some critical practitioners acknowledged that increasingly in real world practice, the “..situations of practice are not problems to be solved, but problematic situations characterized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy” (ibid:15-16).
Yet, one of the assumptions and main arguments Schön makes, based on his detailed analysis of five different specific examples from real world practice, is captured in his concept of ‘knowing-in-practice’.
Basically, he assumes – and through his examples argues – that in problematic situations professionals apply a lot of tacit knowledge as a part of their professional practice, or in other words, professionals know more than they can say (ibid:viii).
Another important assumption behind Schön’s work is – greatly in-spired by philosopher John Dewey – that professionals are learning-by-doing. Both tacit knowing-in-practice and learning-by-doing are central elements in Schön’s still highly relevant main argument. In this type of situation professionals do what Schön has coined: ‘Re-flection-in-Action’.
The contents and topics of these two situations of supervising students are very different. Every situation is unique as Schön continually emphasizes, but the situations of a skilled practitioner sharing or demonstrating his experiences and expertise with a student training to become a practitio-ner are very similar.
As a starting point: To Schön, professional practice happens in and with the (design) situation. As he has found, in practice every situation is com-plex, uncertain and unique. However, when analyzing such real-world situations, with his more generic concepts he does identify similarities. In the end of this Part A, I return to a focus on situations in designing and co-designing practices, and propose to look for situations of sameness.
‘…With the Materials…’
Schön’s titles have been modified from 1983 to 1992 to emphasize how en-gaging in complex, uncertain and unique situations of practice inherently means engaging ‘... with the materials of the (design) situation’. Schön’s underlying idea was the same, but in the paper Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation from 1992, Schön had explicitly added the word ‘materials’ into the reflective conversation about the situation. With that modification he also changed his primary choice of word from ‘medias’ to ‘materials’ (Schön, 1992).
In The Reflective Practitioner, Schön related the exemplified practices of architecture and psychotherapy, and found there were many similarities but also differences between these different professions. One of them was what Schön called, the different ‘media’ or ‘material’ in the conversation with the situation. The ‘medias’ in the architectural example were ‘sketch-pads, delineations and scale models’, and in the example from psycho-therapy the ‘media’ was ‘talk’ (Schön, 1983:128). However, these diverse medias were in both examples a part of the unique, problematic situation of either fitting building units into a particular screwy slope or finding a way of counseling a frustrated patient. In the architectural example, like in ‘classic’ architectural practice, the tangible ‘media’ included in his story are mainly series (and layers of) paper drawings.
When Schön explored the psychotherapeutic example, the ‘media’ was not just ‘talk’. The media in their verbal conversation was made up of a lot of different ways of talking. Some of the talking was about describing the patient’s stories – what Schön also called the patient’s ‘material’. Some talking was about searching for explanations and interpretations, some about opening up and developing alternative interpretations, yet some about conducting experiments of such interpretations, then some sug-gested and guided strategies of coming inquiries and still some more gen-eral discussions about practicing as a psychotherapist through proposing not to make preconceptions (ibid:118-125).
Similarly, Schön also described the architectural example as a design practice combining drawing and talking. As he showed in his analysis, talking is also an inseparable part of the reflective conversation with the Part A
materials of the design situation. In his close analysis, Schön has identified twelve clusters of different elements of talking, which Quist has used in the unique situation with Petra. He has identified ‘talking’ relating to the different elements or domains of program/use, siting, building elements, organization of space, form, structure/technology, scale, cost, building character, precedent, representation and explanation (ibid:96).
Schön saw two different kinds of talking intertwined in Quist’s demon-stration of designing for Petra, inspired by Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘lan-guage games’. Schön called one the lan‘lan-guage of designing and in between this Quist also spoke another meta-language, which Schön called a lan-guage about designing (ibid:80-81,95). Thus, to Schön material in the situ-ation is both tangible and spoken.
In his 1992-paper, Schön has explicitly included ‘...with the materials...’ in the title, and in this paper, he has included other examples of how archi-tecture professionals and students explore and make sense of the materi-als they were provided to work with in different exercises. For example, in a design game exercise, each student got three different construction systems called Legos, Tinker toys and Modula. Tangibly they got various materials to work with, but the four students, Schön discussed, all got the same task to ‘make something they liked’. However, they were working individually, and as Schön wrote, ‘...each of them saw the materials in a different way, chose to use different items, singled out different features, and exploited different relationships between items and features…’ (This is what Schön here called constructing a unique stylistic ‘design world’) (Schön, 1992:9).
In another exercise example, (ibid:8) different professionally practic-ing architects were provided with a material, which Schön described as a principle ‘footprint’ of a branch library, including identifications of six dif-ferent entrances. Apparently there had been problems with entrances at the libraries, which had been built based on this footprint, so these archi-tects, in the role of consultants, were to analyze the footprint and propose guidelines or whatever they found interesting, particularly in relation to entrances, for future library buildings. Again, Schön’s conclusion was that the three different architects described, approached and engaged diffe- rently in the task – or in other words they applied different ‘seeing pat-terns’ in their conversations with the materials of the design situation.
One took the task of proposing guidelines very literally, established one view of grouping entrances (in what he called end and middle entrances), and built his further arguments based on this view. Another architect viewed the whole footprint – first as a middle with pods and later as two L-shaped spaces without any space in the middle to move between the two. By seeing the ‘marks on the page’ differently he also changed his framing of the problem, which then informed further designing and ar-guing. Lastly, another architect imagined herself being a pedestrian ap-proaching one of the entrances to get a sense of the dimensions of the space (ibid:8).
Part B / Introduction
These examples illustrate three very different ways of ‘seeing’ in design-ing, and thus three very different kinds of conversations with quite simi-lar yet different materials of a design situation (I return to the concept of
‘seeing’ in designing below).
To summarize, with his detailed analysis of the many different kinds of
‘medias’ or materials engaged in architecture and psychotherapy, gener-ally Schön views ‘materials’ of practice and of the unique situation broadly, both as tangible materials like paper sketches or Lego bricks as well as many various kinds of talking. However, in my view he has gone more into the subtle nuances and differences of the material ‘talk’ or ‘language’ than he has of the tangible materials in the situations he has studied. It is one of the focuses of this thesis to explore exactly these tangible materials, for example, through understanding their roles in and their relations to the various kinds of talking, or verbal materials, which Schön has shown and argued also to consider as ‘material’ in the unique situation.
(Individual and Collaborative) ‘..Reflective Conversation…’
Schön’s widely acknowledged argument is that generally (professional) practitioners reflect-in-action, and as he has shown in his architectural example, this is also the case in practices of designing. From the parts of his titles dissected above, the reflective conversation happens in action, in the unique situation, and with the various materials of the design situation.
Reflective conversations with the situation can be viewed as pro-cesses of ‘seeing-drawing-seeing’ and of responding to the situation’s
‘back-talk’. In the paper from 1992, again through Petra’s work, Schön describes a reflective conversation as a process of ‘seeing-drawing-see-ing’. Petra’s process is exemplified as a dialogue with her drawings (a typical visual / tangible material in architectural and design practice).
The so called design program − in her case of designing a school − is com-plex, and Petra cannot address all issues at once. Thus, she makes an initial judgment to set and start with the formal problem of the six class-room units (one for each grade), which she ‘sees’ as ‘too small in scale’, and therefore she has an intension of making them into what she calls a more ‘significant scale’. From her process of drawing – making ‘moves’
of − various ways of organizing the units, her L-shaped home bases ap-pear. She then sees these as fulfilling her intension of a more ‘significant scale’, while also creating other qualities – addressing other ‘domains’, as Schön calls them − which she then judges positively, like the creation of what she calls ‘home bases’ between two grades and additionally to the home-base as an ‘outside/inside’ relationship. The ‘reflective conver-sation’ of seeing-drawing-seeing with her drawings is a process of dis- covery, in which she has not defined all her intensions from the begin-ning, and in which she has not been able to predict all the consequences of her moves. Petra has done this as well as she could with her experi-ences of practicing to become a professional.
In the tutoring situation, master Quist demonstrates his ways of design-ing, based on his many years as a professional practitioner – but without
really explaining how and why. At the table, Quist listens to Petra’s de-scriptions of the problems. He sees her drawings, and then he shows a way to approach the situation. However, as Schön sums up, apart from his spoken teacher comments generally about the practice of designing,
Quist has mainly acted as a virtuoso designer responding tacitly engag-ing his experiences of beengag-ing a professional architect or designer himself.
He is listening to both the back talk from their drawings and the back talk from Petra. In other words, Schön phrases professional (designerly) practice as characterized by listening to and reflecting-in-action to ‘the situation’s back talk’ (Schön, 1983:94). Yet, he has not really engaged in a collaborative conversation or dialogue with her, in which he also reveals his reflections and corrections of errors made, and thereby engages her in his reflections on his own actions to also encourage her to reflect upon her underlying, tacit principles of judgment in her acting (ibid:104,276-278).
Another part of practices of reflective conversation is what Schön calls
‘problem-setting’, through processes of naming, framing and re-fram-ing. In 1983 when The Reflective Practitioner was first published, as Schön puts it, some of critical practitioners acknowledged that increasingly in real world professional practice, the “…situations of practice are not prob-lems to be solved but problematic situations characterized by uncertainty, disorder, and indeterminacy” (ibid:15-16).
Schön’s critique of working with hypotheses is that they depend on previ-ously ‘well-formed problems’, but from his studies of professional practice
‘problems are unique and unstable’, so they typically do not fit within aca-demic, theoretical and generalized categories. Furthermore, he states that
‘problems do not present themselves to the practitioner as given’ (ibid:40), but they ‘must be constructed from the materials of problematic, puzzling, troubling and uncertain situations’ (ibid:40). Thus, an integral part of pro-fessional practice is ‘problem setting’.
Generally, Schön describes problem setting as ‘a process in which, inter-actively, we name the things to which we will attend and ‘frame’ the con-text in which we will attend to them.’ (ibid:40). He continues; ‘When we set the problem, we select what we will threat as the “things” of the situation;
we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coher-ence that allow us to say what is wrong, and in what direction the situation needs to be changed’ (ibid:40).
Similarly, Petra decided to start by focusing on the significant scale of the classroom units. Additionally, according to Schön, there is ‘...a problem in finding the problem…’ (ibid:129), and in both the examples of architectural and psychotherapeutic practice, the supervisors are demonstrating to the students how they continually question their initial focuses and views, to
‘reframe’ what they see as the problems of the situation they are in.
An example: Back to the beginning of their reviewing session, Petra started by presenting her problem of being stuck, as she could not solve
the problems she had uncovered. She said: “I am having trouble getting past the diagrammatic phase. I’ve written down the problems on this list.
I’ve tried to fit the shape of the building into the contours of the land there, but the shape doesn’t fit into the slope”.
Quist starts by asking “What other big problems?”, and after having ques-tioned the scale and directions in relation to north-south, he verbally re-frames the problem by saying “You should begin with a discipline…” …and he proposes the parallel principle.
Another example of Quist reframing Petra’s original view, concerns the gallery, which she originally thought of as a general pass-through, but through their explorations in his words have changed from being “in a minor way…the major thing” (ibid : 91). In the situations of both architec-ture and psychotherapy, the supervisors relate to their prior experiences, but masterly demonstrate an engagement in ‘…the peculiarities of the situ-ation at hand’ (ibid: 129). They do this by listening and step by step re-fra-ming the problems stated by the students to find the problem(s) they find worth prioritizing and paying attention to.
About an exercise called ‘Silent game’, Schön describes an example in which three people are engaging without any clear prior roles of being either the teacher or the student (Schön, 1992:11). In this exercise and col-laborative situation − as the ‘silence’ word in the exercise title indicates – a constraint was no talking. This was a collaborative exercise with two players, A and B and an observer C, and A was to construct a secret ‘rule’
− like ‘trying to get relationships that are not horizontal or vertical’ − based on which he/she would build a construction with the available ‘ma-terials’ (Lego bricks). Next, it is hopeful that player B would understand and extend. And then they took turns until they were both satisfied. Ob-server C observes and documents every move along the way, and after-wards verbally everyone shares their experiences of seeing and doing.
In this very constructed exercise, it can be criticized that the so called problem-framing is very limited, and that a lot of issues are left out. With his academic intensions of creating scientific knowledge about reflective
In this very constructed exercise, it can be criticized that the so called problem-framing is very limited, and that a lot of issues are left out. With his academic intensions of creating scientific knowledge about reflective