How designers learn

Donald Schon writes in his last book ("Frame Reflection" see ref below) about the process with which designers learn from experience and about how knowledge aimed at supporting designers are produced.

He makes the case that one commonly accepted way of developing knowledge is to develop what he calls "covering laws", that is, externally valid propositions, "propositions that are probably true of all the instances to which they are applicable in principle." However, he states that one problem with this kind of knowledge when it comes to design is that it tends to "fail in practice because other things are never entirely equal in all relevant aspects". Design situations are always unique. He also states that "covering laws" that do seem to prove relatively useful commonly turn out to be trivial and not improving practical wisdom.

On the other hand "situation-specific, case-based studies of practice,...., tend to be dismissed by critics of normal social science persuasion because they do not produce externally valid generalizations." So, what is left? what kind of knowledge production actually works for the support of designers?

Schon's answer is that designers "do learn from their own past experience and from their vicarious experience of other people's practice". And that they do, in fact, generalize from these experiences. But their experiences are not "covering laws". Instead, their mode of generalization is what Schon calls "reflective transfer". With this concept, he means the "process by which patterns detected in one situation are carried over as projective models to other situations where they are used to generate new causal inferences and are subjected to new, situation-specific tests of internal validity".

This is a wonderful sentence. It is a sentence that explains why designers have to do design to learn and that the deepest form of learning requires practical experience. But it also means that in order to be able to carry over patterns as projective models, you need to be able to abstract thinking, to in some sense 'theorize" your experiences, which is why you also need tools that help you do this. Doing and thinking together.


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Donald A. Schon & Martin Rein, 1994, Frame Reflection - towards the resolution of intractable policy controversies. Basic Books