and the blog/book review of the book by Dan Saffer who is an Experience Design Director at Adaptive Path and the author of the book Designing for Interaction: Creating Smart Applications and Clever Devices.
http://www.odannyboy.com/blog/new_archives/2007/09/review_the_refl.html
The attraction of this book has been the way in which the design problem is set out to be understood and then defined, which in the context of complex design problems would be applicable.
The aim/relevance of the following is to just to bring about the thoughts of Donald Schön and the views of Dan Saffer to understand in such a way which may have application to my own design problems and to highlight and actually be able to fully understand the problem which has to be a key issue before attempting any real design in such a complex environment that the lab book exists in.The book summary is also to be used to pick my own way through the book so will leave open to be able to come back to.
The Reflective Practitioner was written in the early 1980s and took as its premise that the world of work was changing rapidly, that there was a group of people (Richard Florida's Creative Class mostly) who, unlike doctors, engineers, and scientists, didn't rely on technical knowledge for their expertise. Schön calls these people "practitioners" and their ranks include everything from social workers to city planners to architects and designers. People who, in the words of Charles Reich, "can be counted on to do their job, but not necessarily to define it."
Practitioners, Schön says, have "an awareness of complexity that resists the skills and techniques of traditional expertise" and are "frequently embroiled in conflicts of values, goals, purposes, and interests." (Much like ever project I've ever worked on!) Being a practitioner means that the traditional methods and techniques of analytical thinking and scientific process simply don't work. Problems in the messy world of practitioners "are interconnected, environments are turbulent, and the future is indeterminate." What is called for under these conditions, Schön argues, are professionals who can, as Russell Ackoff says, "design a desirable future and invent ways of bringing it about."
- Really think the next section is applicable
In real-world practice, problems do not present themselves to practitioners as givens. They must be constructed from the materials of problematic situations that 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.
Problem setting is where we "name the things to which we will attend and frame the context to which we will attend to them." This cannot be achieved by Technical Rationality, because Technical Rationality depends on understanding what the end is. Only through naming and framing, which do not depend on applying general scientific principles, can these complex problems eventually be solved.
This, however, doesn't stop practitioners from looking for tried-and-true methods and techniques that will solve all their problems in a neat way. You see this all the time with designers at conferences and on mailing lists, searching for the next great method. Schön says that for practitioners, replying on methods and techniques will leave them solving problems of relatively little importance, for both clients and society at large. It is only by "descending into the swamp" where the practitioners must forsake technical rigor that the really important and challenging problems will be found- the concept of giving up technical rigor not so sure in terms of validity of results but would agree it would provide a more useful insight, could you have a balance between the two?
The everyday life of practitioners involves "tacit knowing-in-action," that is, we instinctively know stuff and know how to do stuff, even if we can't explain how to do it. We make judgments, evaluate situations, and recognize patterns without much thought.
- Reflection-in-action works, according to Schön:
How do practitioners know if they have chosen the right frame? Schön lays out the criteria:
- Can I solve the problem I have set?
- Do I like what I get when I solve this problem?
- Have I made the situation coherent?
- Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories?
- Have I kept inquiry moving?
Thus, Schön, says, practitioners judge a "problem-setting by the quality and direction of the reflective conversation to which it leads. This judgement rests, at least in part, on his perception of potentials for coherence and congruence which he can realize through his further inquiry."
- The criteria set out is of real interest, and could look to understand own problem ? May also like to look at exist work to understand/evaluate how the existing e-lab book systems
are defined in actually understanding the problem?
- The concept and benefits of framing design problems from the criteria is captured in the next section
Framing a problem means making a hypothesis of the situation. But you need to test the frame somehow, and that is where experiments come in.
Reflective practitioners perform on-the-spot experiments to see if they have framed the problem in the correct way, meaning that the problem can be tackled in a manner that is agreeable to the practitioner and that keeps the "inquiry" moving ahead. The practitioner takes into account the unique features of the problem in crafting the experiment, drawing on "a repertoire of examples, images, understandings, and actions."
Unlike scientists, practitioners undertake these experiments not just to understand the situation, but to change it into something better. Experiments consist of "moves" like in chess. Any hypothesis has to "lend itself to embodiment in a move." A practitioner makes a move and sees how the situation "responds" to that move, each move acting as a sort of "exploratory probe" of the situation.
Here is Schön on how the experiments work:
The practitioner's hypothesis testing consists of moves that change the phenomena to make the hypothesis fit...The practitioner makes his hypothesis come true. He acts as though his hypothesis were in the imperative mood. He says, in effect, "Let it be the case that X..." and shapes the situation so that X becomes true.Schön calls the experiments "a game with the situation." Practitioners try to make situation conform to the hypotheses, but have to remain open to the possibility that they won't.
If a move doesn't work, practitioners should "surface the theory implicit in the move, [critize] it, [restructure] it, and [test] the new theory by inventing a move consistent with it." When practitioners find the changes to the situation created by their moves to be satisfactory, that is when they should stop experimenting, and/or move on to the next part of the situation.
By creating these in-the-stuation experiments, Schön notes, rightly, that "practice is a kind of research."
If a move doesn't work, practitioners should "surface the theory implicit in the move, [critize] it, [restructure] it, and [test] the new theory by inventing a move consistent with it." When practitioners find the changes to the situation created by their moves to be satisfactory, that is when they should stop experimenting, and/or move on to the next part of the situation.
By creating these in-the-situation experiments, Schön notes, rightly, that "practice is a kind of research."
- Point wish to explore further here from the book more directly, for the reason that from the discussions with scientist the nature of what is described above very much relates to the nature of research work that is being conducted
- So point is to clarify what scientists as defined by Schön and clarify if what Schön notes defines to be a practitioner would relate to the concept of what scientist that I am observing would be defined by myself in my own work. (slightly off concept of setting what the design problem is but using to gain if any insight can be gained about nature of what a scientist can be perceived to be)
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