Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice

In this paper, we present Schön’s approach to design, as we have described it in The Cognitive Artifacts of Designing (2006). Schön is (if one excepts the design theorist Rittel) the first author after Simon to introduce a new approach to cognitive design theory. Schön formulated his view on design in terms of “reflective activity” and related notions, especially “reflective practice”, “reflection-in-action”, and “knowing-in-action”. We interpret the activities underlying these notions as forms of what situativity authors have qualified as “situated action” and “situated cognition”. In “reflection-in-action”, “doing and thinking are complementary. Doing extends thinking in the tests, moves, and probes of experimental action, and reflection feeds on doing and its results. Each feeds the other, and each sets boundaries for the other” (Schön, 1983, p. 280). Reflection-in-action is the reflective form of knowing-in-action: It is Schön’s assumption that “competent practitioners usually know more than they can say” (Schön, 1983, p. 8): this illustrates the classical, generally applicable difference between “knowing how” and “knowing that”. For Schön, design was one of a series of activities in domains that involve reflective practice: City planning, engineering, management, and law, but also education, psychotherapy, and medicine. As he says it, “the designer constructs the design world within which he/she sets the dimensions of his/her problem space, and invents the moves by which he/she attempts to find solutions.” (Schön, 1992, p. 11) Schön: Design as a Reflective Practice Except for Rittel, Schön is, as far as we know, the first author after Simon to introduce a new approach to cognitive design theory. Another author of early SIT-inspired research is Bucciarelli, who has focused, in particular, on collaborative design analysed from a social perspective. Schön formulated his view on design in terms of "reflective activity" and related notions, especially "reflective practice," "reflection-in-action," and "knowing-in-action." We interpret the activities underlying these notions as forms of what situativity authors have qualified as "situated action" and "situated cognition" (Greeno & Moore, 1993). "Reflective activity" may be defined as the "activity by which [people] take work itself as an object of reflection" (Falzon et al., 1997, quoted in Mollo & Falzon, 2004, p. 532). Schön (1983) writes: When a practitioner reflects in and on his practice, the possible objects of his reflection are as varied as the kinds of phenomena before him and the systems of knowing-in-practice that he brings to them. He may reflect on the tacit norms and appreciations that underlie a judgment, or on the strategies and theories implicit in a pattern of behaviour. He may reflect on the feeling for a situation that has led him to adopt a particular course of action, on the way in which he has framed the problem he is trying to solve, or on the role he has constructed for himself within a larger institutional context. (1983, p. 62) In "reflection-in-action," "doing and thinking are complementary. Doing extends thinking in the tests, moves, and probes of experimental action, and reflection feeds on doing and its results. Each feeds the other, and each sets boundaries for the other" (Schön, 1983, p. 280). In a presentation of "Donald Alan Schön (1930–1997)" in The Encyclopedia of Informal Education, Smith (2001) writes that, even if Schön was "trained as a philosopher,... it was his concern with the development of reflective practice and learning systems within organizations and communities for 1 "SIT" is the abbreviation of "situativity," an approach to action, not only cognitive action (Greeno & Moore, 1993), which Schön adopted in his analysis of design in terms of "reflective pratice". in ria -0 06 04 63 4, v er si on 1 29 J un 2 01 1 Author manuscript, published in "Collection, 2 (2010) 21-25"