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

three paradigms for practice by Donald Schön:

1. Reflection in Action = closely tied to experience of surprise
   1. ...while in the process evolve the way of doing it. (doing /) playing while on occasion noting and responding
2. Stop and Think (practitioner pauses to reflect, takes distance)
3. 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

1. hiding away key aspects of an object or product
2. 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)