The Reflective Practitioner

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1. celluJun 2024
   I’d recommend to read the reflective practitioner, by Donald Schön
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2. cwingravMay 2019
   Item #2 relates to reflecting on your work, Reflective Practice. Give Donald Schon's book The Reflective Practitioner a read (or heck, the Wiki page). It deals with being able to rise above work and improve how you work.
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3. vanderZwanSep 2017
   Thanks for the kind words!

   well, I got half of the stuff in this presentation from my masters in Interaction Design at Malmö, which includes the type of material you talk about (although somewhat surprising, most of it through good teachers passing on privileged information[0], not from reading all the influential books directly).

   Anway, with that in mind it come as no surprise that I'm pretty much in favour of everything you're saying!

   Some self-indulgent context: Malmö's IxD programme, at least when I was there as a student and later as a teacher, is quite different from the UX processes that most people associate with interaction design for apps. Not surprising, since it was founded by Jonas Löwgren of Thoughtful Interaction Design fame[1], and Sweden has a long tradition of using participatory design[2].

   The program was more of a broad human-centered design program that happens to specialise in IxD. This was very much a response to the HCI funk of the late eighties/early nineties, where the latter field had painted itself into a corner by trying to do everything through quantitative methods (this is the simplified caricature version of the story of course, as someone with your background probably realises, and HCI has since improved a lot - I think IxD and HCI are kind of converging now).

   Quantitative methods are fine for optimisation, and for verification of an idea, when the question is framed correctly. What it doesn't help with is exploring the idea space or that initial framing of the problem - it is an incomplete tool without qualitative methods.

   We were thought to look at the various humanities and steal whatever is useful for us. To use things like ethnography and cultural probes, or bodystorming, or ideas from theatre, or any of the things you mentioned. From a high-level point of view, I believe the most important influence on the course was the work by Donald Schön. You might want to check out his writings - especially The Reflective Practitioner.

   > a UX designer with a background in HCI, trapped in an uninspired and aging tech company trying to get them to think differently or die trying.

   I think a lot of this is more political than anything else. I mean, changing this involves changing existing structures and power dynamics, and addressing fears of things changing itself. It's a pain if you're stuck in a system like that.

   [0] nautil.us/issue/6/secret-codes/teaching-me-softly

   [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/thoughtful-interaction-design

   [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participatory_design

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4. _deliriumAug 2012
   I would say the field is even broader than just those two areas. Much design literature is on a third focus, the interaction between desiderata and materials, which has a significant overlap with engineering. This is perhaps most obvious in architecture (the kind involving buildings, but also software architecture / API design), which is as its core not primarily UX or visual design, though it has elements of both. Herb Simon's The Sciences of the Artificial is my favorite book in this area, though Donald Schön's The Reflective Practitioner is also a good book on design in this broader sense of producing human-usable artifacts out of materials.
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5. thadkDec 2021
   I was also struck by a similar section of Reflective Practitioner and wrote this thread some years ago about how professional ambiguity is furthered as computers advance: https://twitter.com/thadk/status/1211175280498356226?s=21
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