Advancing Donald Schön's Reflective Practitioner: Where to Next?

Abstract

In 1983, Donald Schön published his seminal work, The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. The book emerged during the peak of the Design Methods movement, when works like L. Bruce Archer's Systematic Method for Designers and Herbert A. Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial argued for recognizing design processes as scientific inquiries. Coincidentally, Schön posited an alternative view to rationalizing design processes, called professional artistry, which is implicit professional knowledge. Using protocol studies in various disciplines, he demonstrated that professionals reflect-in-action while working and, as a result, learn and produce knowledge through doing (knowing-in-action). Since the 1980s, design theorists, researchers, and professionals have used Schön's work enthusiastically to articulate that designers learn more about their design process and design project as they design. Forty years after publication, The Reflective Practitioner continues to serve many design researchers as a foundation of learning from the experience of their design processes. However, this theory has limitations that must be recognized and addressed to stay relevant today. The Reflective Practitioner was written for individuals, whereas nowadays, designers often work in teams. The next step is to consider how individual reflections are shared and learned with other designers so that the team benefits from its collective reflective practices.