Title: An Ontological Account of Donald Schön’s Reflection in Designing

This paper proposes an ontological model of Donald Schön’s notion of reflection in the domain of designing. We address two views of this notion. First, we present a functional view that describes reflection in terms of the designer’s interactions with the design object and their intended and unintended consequences that then drive further interactions. Second, we present a constructional view that models reflection as a mechanism with a set of properties that distinguish it from other processes in designing. We describe both views using the function-behaviour-structure (FBS) ontology. This elaborates existing accounts of reflection and locates it within a uniform framework of designing, which lays the foundations for a multi-disciplinary approach to studying reflection.