Notes on Donald Shön’s The Reflective Practitioner
Donald Schön’s The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action has so much to say (indirectly) about design and what it means to be a designer, especially UX designers. As it turns out, there is a reason for the fact we’re constantly fighting about things like role/discipline boundaries and titles. The book also offers and analyzes a way of working that is very much how the best designers I’ve ever worked with work. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a successful designer who does not work this way.
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 every 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.”
Naming and Framing
All isn’t roses for practitioners, however. We’re struggling against 400 years of Technical Rationality, which is “problem-solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique.” Technical Rationality is ingrained in our workplaces and in our universities, and the professions that practice it (doctors, lawyers, engineers) are emphasized and revered over those that don’t. Professions that practice Technical Rationality apply general principles (medicine, law, physics) to specific problems to achieve unambiguous results (health, justice, bridges, etc.).
However, Schön points out, “Increasingly we have become aware of the importance to professional practice of phenomena — complexity, uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflict — which do not fit the model of Technical Rationality.” Instead of simply problem solving, practitioners instead need to problem set. That is, “to determine the decisions to be made, the ends to be achieved, the means which may be chosen.”
Schön says,
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 online, searching for the next great method. Schön says that for practitioners, relying 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.
Reflection-in-Action
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. But practitioners sometimes need to think about what they are doing while they do it. This is what Schön calls Reflection-in-Action. Something challenging or puzzling happens and the practitioner has to reflect on what the best way is to address it, and what his or her actions should be in response to it. This is where the “art” of practice comes in.
An expert practitioner, Schön says, (I’m paraphrasing here) is one who can selectively manage large amounts of information, spin out long lines of invention and inference, and has the capacity to hold several ways of looking at things at once without disrupting the flow of inquiry. Schön notes that it is important to realize that in most areas of practice, there are competing schools of thought about the nature of the practice and how to best solve problems. But the structure of reflection-in-action crosses the divide between them.
Here’s how reflection-in-action works, according to Schön:
When the phenomenon at hand eludes the normal categories of knowledge-in-practice, presenting itself as unique or unstable, the practitioner may surface and criticize his initial understanding of the phenomenon, construct a new description of it, and test the new description by an on-the-spot experiment.
This isn’t a rare occurrence, Schön asserts. Indeed, for some practitioners, this is the core of their process. I certainly know it is for me.
When confronted by an unusual situation, practitioners “seek to discover the particular features of his problematic situation, and from their gradual discovery, designs an intervention.” The problem is not given — “There is a problem in finding the problem.” Practitioners, while still having relevant prior experience, still treat each case as unique, and thus “cannot deal with it by applying standard theories and techniques.” The practitioner has “a reflective conversation” with the situation.
The first part of this conversation is to reframe the situation, to put yourself into the situation and impose some sort of order onto it. By reframing, practitioners seek to both understand the situation and change it. When reframing, practitioners have no idea what the implications of the new frame will be, just that within the frame, practitioners can then practice the methods they know to try to solve the problem.
Once the situation is framed, practitioners take the reframed problem and conduct experiments on it to “discover what consequences and implications can be made to follow from it.” If these consequences and implications don’t suit the practitioner, the situation is reframed again and again until it does. In design, we call this iteration, prototyping, and testing. The situation itself “talks back” through the unintended effects and practitioners have to listen and change the frame appropriately.
How do practitioners know if they have chosen the right frame? Schön lays out the criteria:
1. Can I solve the problem I have set?
2. Do I like what I get when I solve this problem?
3. Have I made the situation coherent?
4. Have I made it congruent with my fundamental values and theories?
5. 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 judgment rests, at least in part, on his perception of potentials for coherence and congruence which he can realize through his further inquiry.”
Framing a problem means making a hypothesis about the situation. But you need to test the frame somehow, and that is where experiments come in.
Experiments
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 the situation conform to the hypothesis, but have to remain open to the possibility that they won’t. Schön notes
The practice situation is neither clay to be molded at will nor an independent, self-sufficient object of study from which the inquirer keeps his distance.
The inquirer’s relation to the situation is transactional. He shapes the situation, but in conversation with it, so that his own models and appreciations are also shaped by the situation. The phenomena that he seeks to understand are partially of his own making; he is in the situation that he seeks to understand.
If a move doesn’t work, practitioners should “surface the theory implicit in the move, [critique] 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.”
Clash of The Frames
What does it mean to be a reflective practitioner? Schön says
[E]ach individual develops his own way of framing his role. Whether he chooses his role frame from the profession’s repertoire, or fashions it for himself, his professional knowledge takes on the characteristics of a system. The problem he sets, the strategies he employs, the facts he treats as relevant, and his interpersonal theories of action are bound up with his way of framing his role.
This is why we see so many clashes online about what to call ourselves, what our roles should be, and where the boundaries are for disciplines like UX design and interaction design. It’s different frames colliding. One practitioner thinks interaction design is UI design, another thinks information architecture is the center of UX, and on and on. Schön suggests that rather than fight about which of these frames is the correct one, we simply practice “frame analysis.”
When a practitioner becomes aware of his frames, he also becomes aware of the possibility for alternate ways of framing the reality of his practice. He takes note of the values and norms to which he has given priority, and those he has given less importance, or left out of the frame altogether…Frame analysis may help practitioners to become aware of their tacit frames and thereby lead them to experience the dilemmas inherent in professional pluralism. Once practitioners notice they actively construct the reality of their practice and become aware of the variety of frames available to them, they begin to see the need to reflect-in-action on their previous tacit frames.
Schön is basically saying, Put down your arms. In all professional practices, there are different schools of thought which often result in very different personal frames for practice. If we instead look at them as frames, we can consider and even move between them as necessary. For some projects, it may make sense to step outside of the frame of “UX designer” and instead take on the frame of “UI designer” and vice versa.
The Importance of Clients
Schön also notes the importance of clients in the life of a practitioner. Practitioners agree to use their “special powers” for the good of the client, and clients in turn “agree to show deference to the professional.” Without this social contract, the role of the practitioner breaks down. But the practitioner has to deliver on this promise as well, of course. This is especially true with reflective practitioners because their methods and techniques change in response to the situation and through conversations with the client.
Although the reflective practitioner should be credentialed and technically competent, his claim to authority is substantially based on his ability to manifest his special knowledge in his interactions with clients. He does not ask the client to have blind faith in a “black box,” but to remain open to the practitioner’s competence as it emerges…the client does not agree to accept the practitioner’s authority but to suspend disbelief in it. He agrees to join the practitioner in inquiring into the situation for which the client seeks help; to try to understand what he is experiencing and make that understanding accessible to the practitioner; to confront the practitioner when he does not understand or agree; to test the practitioner’s competence by observing his effectiveness and to make public his questions over what should be counted as effectiveness; to pay for services rendered and to appreciate competence demonstrated.
If it’s not clear from this lengthy review, I highly recommend this book. Although it was written 40 years ago, its relevance for professional practice, and especially the design practice, is still high. Framing problems and our personal frames around professional practice is a great way to think about how to approach projects and our work lives.
May we all be reflective practitioners.
