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The audience I have in mind for this e-book.
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The audience I have in mind for this e-book.
This book is intended to support critical reflection by information designers on their professional practice.
So it includes ideas about the cast of characters in the designer’s world: readers or users, writers, and clients. And it includes ideas about the context in which communication happens. It also includes summaries of theoretical ideas about perception, cognition and language.
The concept of reflective practice underpinning professional knowledge is associated with Donald Schön.1 He speaks of reflection-in-action and reflection-on-action.
Reflection-in-action is about making every design decision a considered one. Reflection-on-action is about learning from everything one does.
He also speaks of knowing-in-action, which is the recognition that tacit knowledge is real knowledge, whether or not someone has published a scientific study of it.
Key to Schön’s concept of reflective practice is the idea of repertoire:
The practitioner has built up a repertoire of examples, images, understandings, and actions… When a practitioner makes sense of a situation he perceives to be unique, he sees it as something already present in his repertoire. To see this site as that one is not to subsume the first under a familiar category or rule. It is, rather, to see the unfamiliar, unique situation as both similar to and different from the familiar one, without at first being able to say similar or different with respect to what. The familiar situation functions as a precedent, or a metaphor, or … an exemplar for the unfamiliar one. (Schön 1983: 138)
I realise this takes some unpicking (and please excuse the gendered language still common in the early 1980s)... he’s saying that when we encounter new things we place them in the context of things we are already familiar with (our repertoire of examples). Reflective practice involves having a ‘reflective conversation’ with the situation, looking for patterns and reframing the problem.
It seems to me that this process of repertoire-building is why it takes good designers so long to get good.2 You don’t get it from lectures or books, but by continuously observing and reflecting. I see the concepts of genre and design patterns as key to this for information designers. They are ways to identify and name (and therefore to reflect upon) examples of design in practice.
Schön was talking about all professions, but Karel van der Waarde and Maurits Vroombout have written in more depth about the types of reflection that work for graphic designers.3
1. Schön, D. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. Temple Smith.
2. Professional designers spend three years or more at uni, and generally aren't considered reliably effective until a year or two into their first job.
3. van der Waarde, K., & Vroombout, M. (2012). Communication design education: Could nine reflections be sufficient? Visible Language, 46(1-2), 20-35.