The reflective practitioner

Naming — Framing — Knowing-in-Action — Reflection-In-Action — Reflection-On-Action

Since we have begun the project phase of the course, the lecture today about Schön’s reflective practitioner will be reflected on in relation to our lamp process.

After Jonas’ lecture there was a question about how you can utilise the notions that Schön presents in our project brief. This was asked, I think, because as we have a very broad and open project brief is seems overwhelming and difficult to name. What is unusual about our project brief is the fact that we are not ‘commisioned’ to solve a problem, but rather experiment and try and imagine new ways to interact with a lamp. In that way it can be difficult to see how we are supposed frame a problem.

In relation to the context of our lamp, we have named the situation of a child being afraid of the dark and thereby framed the problem of a child not being able to go to sleep — Though at Show and Tell II, we were reminded that we are not supposed to be problem-solvers.

When we start prototyping in the next weeks we will dive further into the aspects of ‘knowing-in-action’ and ‘reflection-in-action’ as we start to interact with our lamp.

During Show and Tell II it became obvious that we don’t have the specific interactions pinned down yet. We talked about how the lamp’s affordances (Norman 2013) would invite the child into an interaction with it. This is especially a challenge as we so far mostly imagine hard materials to be approachable from a building-aspect, as we are all so limited in our knowledge about Arduino. But if a child is supposed to cuddle the lamp or stroke it, it should afford this quality by being soft or otherwise warm. This affordance can also be linked to ‘knowing-in-action’ as we would like the child to not think too much about the interaction with the lamp. A resemblance to a teddy bear or another well-known artefact would make use of the tacit knowledge that is to stroke something that is soft.

Next week, we will try out bodystorming to test how one’s reactions and interactions with something would be if one was scared. We hope that this will reveal some of the reflexes we as people do when we’re scared, that we cannot articulate or think of when we’re just sitting in a normal comfortable situation.

References:

• Norman, Donald A. The design of everyday things: Revised and expanded edition. Basic books, 2013.
• Schön, Donald A. “Designing as reflective conversation with the materials of a design situation.” Research in Engineering Design 3.3 (1992): 131–147.
• Schön, Donald. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. San Francisco.