User:Kim/reading/A Reflective Conversation with Materials
Reflective Conversation with Materials: An interview with Donald Schön by JohnBennett
in 'Bringing Design to Software' by Terry Winograd, 1996
Text
three paradigms for practice by Donald Schön:
- Reflection in Action = closely tied to experience of surprise
- ...while in the process evolve the way of doing it. (doing /) playing while on occasion noting and responding
- Stop and Think (practitioner pauses to reflect, takes distance)
- Reflection on practice is a more meta reflection on practice, habits and repetitive experiences
- importance of unpredictability in design: emphasizes that there is no direct path between designers intention and outcome (how something is used/ perceived)
As you work a problem, you are continually in the process of developing a path into it, forming new appreciations and understandings as you make new moves.
- on conversation with the materials designers judgements can have the intimacy of a conversational relationship
- receiving response from the medium
- inventions made through conversation with the users (example 3M tape) and how they use product
- "A good designer strives to make the details work so well that they become invisible to the user." I dont think so – this means
- hiding away key aspects of an object or product
- allowing for hints to the user how the object works and give different entries to it
- Objects failure or difficulty in use "makes visible its insides (how it is made, of what it is made)"
- tacitness (Michael Polanyi, 1966) in a smoothly working artifact, its operations, inherent materials become invisible to the user
- on the necessity of taste as a designer, not as in 'style' but developing an inner gyroscope (judging if something is good or not)
Questions
- How do you currently document your design/artistic practice? Could you bring or describe a specific example in class? How do you feel about the way you do it right now logistically?
- bring:
- my website(s)
- screenshots folder
- both involve a lot of manual work, low-tech and local (on my computer) I like that about it but aim for more structure categorize screenshots in subfolders, use sth like pelican (static site generator based on simple markdown language and folder structure)
- What is your approach to reflecting on your design/artistic practice? Could you bring an example of how you have made a specific design decision?"
- I like play and attentively staying with the visual process (Designing websites, if possible I dont make drafts but start coding directly, using material language from beginning on)
- form is always conversing with content and material
- network-matters.xyz
- website stretched across 3 axes, encompassing my different approaches to the field, multi-layeredness of information mirrors deep structure of code based text, experimental interaction with the site brings forth unexpected angles, entirely based on are.na as a cms (stretching boundaries of a platform)