changing patterns of inquiry in work and living

CHANGING PATTERNS OF INQUIRY IN WORK AND LIVINGAuthor(s): DONALD A. SCHONSource: Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 135, No. 5367 (FEBRUARY 1987), pp. 225-237Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41374280 .

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CHANGING PATTERNS OF INQUIRY

IN WORK AND LIVING

I The Thomas Cubiti Lecture by I

III DONALD A. SCHON III

Ford Professor of Urban Studies and Education in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning ,

Massachusetts Institute of Technology , USA , delivered to the Society on Wednesday 28th May 1986,

with Andrew Derbyshire , MA, FRIBA , Chairman , Robert Matthew , Johnson-Marshall ' London , in the Chair

LORD ASHCOMBE: Once again, on behalf of my fellow Trustees, I should like to thank the Royal Society of Arts for all their help and encouragement to produce our annual lecture in memory of my ancestor, Thomas Cubitt. We are very pleased to have persuaded Pro- fessor Schon to give this year's lecture, and at dinner last night, while talking to him, I felt a distinct regret for the many years I had wasted by my own lack of enthusiasm at school. I have great pleasure in asking Mr Andrew Derby-

shire to act as our Chairman for the evening.

THE CHAIRMAN: The Thomas Cubitt Trust was set up to promote debate, and therefore understanding of quality, in the design, management and maintenance of the environment. Donald Schon has devoted much of an outstanding career in doing exactly what the Trust was set up to do. He has been concerned for much of his life with the professions and particularly with the environmental and caring professions and how they serve, or fail to serve, society. The professions in this country, especially those to do with the building industry, have been a beleaguered tribe for many years. We have been under unremitting pressure to abandon codes of professional conduct and minimum fee scales, to go commercial, to submit to market forces and generally come off our high horse and behave like everybody else. This widespread pressure has come from all shades of political opinion. Many of us have welcomed it, so long as we could keep the baby separate from the bath water and maintain what was of

real benefit in the professional ideal. However, we did see the need to change our attitudes and procedures in response to changing social demands and new economic pressures. Architects have had a particularly tough battering,

including examination by the Prices and Incomes Board, and then two separate references to the Mono- polies Commission, on all of which I have spent an inordinate amount of time, like Canute resisting the tide, or at least as much of it as I thought could be stemmed. In the event there is very little left except the exclusive right to the title of architect, for what it is worth. Even so, many of my colleagues have responded positively and taken the opportunity to increase the rate at which new forms of practice and new ways of managing design and construction are being devel- oped. More architects are now talking about com- panies rather than partnerships; they are also thinking about the advantages of multi-skilled design teams under one roof and clients are beginning to expect this. New relationships are emerging to repair the fragmentation of the industry both in education and construction. Ever since his Reith Lectures in 1970 Donald Schon

has been an inspiration and a reassurance to those of us engaged in these difficult processes and in the drive to shake ourselves clear of the inhibitions of our nine- teenth-century traditions. At the same time he has always warned us of the need for continuing care in the preservation of those aspects of the professional ideal which are of lasting worth to society and those

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS forms of education, particularly the studio work customary in architecture for more than two hundred years, which are probably of universal value. He reminded me last night that one of the restrictive professional practices which rescued America from McCarthyism was the security of tenure enjoyed by the academics, who were thus protected from the worst consequences of opposing the Establishment; a sobering thought. Donald tells me that Britain is the place where his

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philosophy attracts the most rapid and sympathetic response. I was surprised to hear this. Perhaps it is because he is a 'worldly philosopher' (as I understand one of his friends calls him) eminently understandable by a race of pragmatic practitioners whose favourite phrase of intellectual dismissal is 'too clever by half. His great gift is that in spite of his brilliance he never

makes us feel stupid; foolish perhaps, but that is good for us and stimulates the kind of debate and understanding which this evening is devoted to.

The following lecture, which was illustrated, was then delivered.

IT pleasure to be

IS

here,

conventional to be

particularly here, but

to it seeing

say is really

that

the a pleasure

faces

it is

of

a pleasure to be here, but it is really a pleasure to be here, particularly seeing the faces of

good friends in this audience. What I should like to talk about this evening is

a set of dilemmas that affect professional practitioners. Because professional practitioners affect us all, their dilemmas are ours. We should have a special interest in the kind of inquiry by which we might deal with these dilemmas, a kind of inquiry to which, I believe, architects and designers, more generally, may make a special contribution.

I shall begin, as usual, by telling stories. The first one has to do with Three Mile

Island. Of course, Chernobyl occupies the head- lines today, but before Chernobyl there was Three Mile Island ~ a near disaster at a nuclear reactor in New Jersey, in the early or middle Seventies. You have to imagine yourselves in the the control room of this reactor. There is a four foot concrete wall that separates you from the fuel rods, and you are looking at an enormously complicated array of lights, dials and gauges. The alarm rings. You must know that there are two sets of pipes, one that conducts water in direct contact with the fuel rods; the other, separated from the first, the secondary, that takes the heat from the first and uses it to make steam. The alarm rings, the pump kicks on in the secondary, the PORVs (they are pressure relief valves) open up, and the back-up pumps kick on to provide water to replace the water that has been lost.

But it turns out that, unbeknownst to the operators, multiple errors occurred. The secondary pumps did not kick on. The light, designed to signal such a malfunction, was covered by a maintenance tag. Nobody saw it. The pressure relief valve did not close. It was supposed to have closed, but remained stuck in the open 226

position. The light, designed to indicate this, failed because of a lack of current. What actually happened was a LOCA, a 'loss of coolant acci- dent'; water began gushing out the system, and some 30,000 gallons would be lost before the LOCA was detected and the valve closed two hours later.

At first, the operators thought everything was normal. Then, suddenly, they saw what they called a 'Christmas Tree' of alarm lights. They read on their dials what they later called 'weird data': water in the primary was rising, but the pressure was falling. The operators had never seen anything like it before. What they did was to respond to one piece of data. They saw that the water was rising and cut off the emergency water supply - which meant that water to cool the fuel rods was now being taken away altogether. The fuel rods were uncovered, and the situation was heading rapidly towards meltdown. Under those circumstances, as one of the operators later testified at a Congressional Hearing, 'We were riffling through the book of procedures to find one that fitted the data.'

The operators hit upon a hypothesis of 'least damage': they supposed that steam bubbles were getting into the primary pipes. They held tenaciously to this hypothesis for four more hours. Whenever there was a chance to interpret new data according to the 'least damage' hypothesis, they did so. There was a thud, for example, in the containment area. It could have been any one of three things: a change in the delivery of electrical power, a ventilator damper changing mode, or hydrogen exploding in the core. It was hydrogen exploding in the core, but the operators interpreted it as a ventilator damper changing mode.

All of this reminds me of what a NASA spokes- man said when the rocket carrying their eye-in- the-sky satellite misfired: 'We did everything



FEBRUARY 1987 CHANGING PATTERNS OF INQUIRY IN WORK AND LIVING

by the book and still it went wrong.' Similarly, after the collapse of the Grand Teton dam in the early Seventies, representatives of the Corps of Engineers came to a Congressional Committee and said, 'This is an absolutely unique event. If you follow all the procedures, it is impossible to design a dam that will fail.' And Donald Regan (not Reagan) said, after the Challenger disaster, 'The important thing is that there shall be no surprises.'

From my work with industrial managers, I know how important it is that 'there shall be no surprises'. In fact, if you work for a boss and you come to him in a given month with the news that your performance is twice as good as it is supposed to be, there is a very good likelihood, at least in the United States, that he will not be pleased. He will reason, 'If you could surprise me positively this month, you might surprise me negatively next month.' The important thing is to avoid surprise, employing for this purpose a full panoply of measures, systems of control, targets and systems of reward and punishment to reinforce measures, targets and controls.

Let me turn to another example. We are cur- rently experiencing in the United States a crisis of malpractice insurance. Physicians, especially those specializing in obstetrics and surgery, are being sued for malpractice with increasing fre- quency. As a result, they tend to practise what they call 'defensive medicine'; they work by the book, rigorously following textbook procedures. Even when textbook procedures seem ill-suited to a particular patient, they may be rigorously followed, because a failure to do so may make the physician liable to suit for malpractice.

Finally, I want to tell you a story about schools. In the United States, we go through cycles of dissatisfaction with our public schools. Every twenty years or so, we rediscover their deplorable condition. In the most recent version of our familiar cycle, some State legislatures have reacted to public dissatisfaction by enact- ing laws that specify what will be taught and how it will be taught, in the spirit of a movement called 'Back to Basics'. Some states have introduced mandatory testing programmes for teachers, called 'competency testing'. In these states, legislators are trying to control the schools as tightly as they can in order to get education back to where they think it ought to be.

This is the little set of examples I should like to present to you and have you briefly hold in

mind. What do they all have in common? They are instances of p rocedu ra liza tio n, attempts to reduce professional practice to a set of absolutely clear, precise implementable procedures, coupled with controls designed to enforce the procedures and eliminate surprise. Underlying the systems of procedures and controls are theories; for such procedures depend on theories, for example,' about the workings of nuclear reactors, children's learning, and patients' recovery from disease - the substantive phenomena with which professions deal. In addition, proceduralization depends on a theory of control: how to get people to do what you think they ought to do. These theories have to do with measures of performance and the use of carrots and sticks to make sure that practice conforms to the measures.

What are the consequences of proceduralization and control? One is that surprises do not go away. Reactors still do occasionally get into trouble. Some students still fail to learn 'the basics'. Every once in a while, terrible things happen in hospitals. Surprises are not elminated. There are situations of uncertainty where you simply do not know what to do and cannot for a time make sense of what is going on. There are unique cases which you have never seen before and conflictual situations where the very values and ends you are trying to achieve come into conflict with one another. These indeterminate zones of practice still occur. But a further consequence is that people get to be very good, in a world of the kind I have described, at not noticing surprise. They may use what the psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan calls 'selective inattention', systematically avoiding attention to the data which, if noticed, would produce uncertainty. Or they may use what the anthro- pologist Clifford Geertz calls 'junk categories'.

This term calls for yet another story. If you were to go to Africa and observe tribal potters making pots, you would find that they worked very carefully the night before to knead the clay, prayed to the gods and abstained from sexual intercourse. The next morning, they would put the clay into the oven - and, behold, the pot cracks. The answer is witchcraft. It has to be witchcraft, because the potters did everything right and the pot still cracked. 'Witchcraft' is a wonderful category that enables you to believe, even when you make terrible mistakes and things work out badly, that you know what you're doing. So 'weird data' that do not make

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS

sense, an Absolutely unique case' that you have never seen before and will never see again, 'slow learners' in the schools - these are junk categories. They allow professionals to believe in the adequacy of their procedures, no matter how frequently errors occur.

A further consequence of proceduralization is the multiplication of systems of control. When things go wrong in spite of the fact that we multiply procedures to keep them from happening, the response is to increase and improve procedures. So after Three Mile Island, investi- gators proposed to expand the book of procedures. And after the Grand Teton Dam col- lapsed, the Office of Science and Technology planned to create a new set of procedures that the Federal Government must follow in order to ensure dam safety. When we adopt such remedies we drive out wisdom, artistry and 'feel for phenomena', all of which depend on judg- ment. We produce a world of increased routinization and control and dubious achievement with respect to the disasters we wish to avoid.

For practitioners, the cumulative effect of such remedies is the creation of a Squeeze play'. Artistry, wisdom, judgement, feel for materials, all of which depend upon discretionary freedom, get progressively squeezed out of practice as controls and procedures are multiplied in order to avoid unpleasant surprises. Then, in response to them, squeeze play, organizational games of control and avoidance of control develop. Managers devote a great deal of energy to the control of employees; and employees, to the avoidance of control. An example of such a game is 'optimization to the measures'. Managers try to control subordinates by imposing measures of performance on them; and subordinates find ways to meet the letter of the measures without meeting their spirit. It is like a child who learns to go through school by passing tests, without learning much substantive knowledge.

In the organizational worlds where games of control and avoidance of control occur, the system of the organization itself becomes undis- cussable. It is very difficult for people to discuss games in which they systematically deceive others and mask their real behaviour. In such organizations people have the feeling of living in a house of cards; if they discussed it publicly, it might tumble down. Moreover, undiscussability turns readily into indescribability. Without discussion, we do not practise describing what 228

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goes on; and since we cannot describe it, we would not be very good at discussing it even if we were willing to do so.

Such phenomena affect all of us as human beings. They contribute to a social crisis, made worse by the measures by which we try to fix it, because of the theory of proceduralization and control that guides our fixing.

This crisis is best understood through the lens of the profession. The professions are the cutting edge of the Technological Programme, first enunciated by Francis Bacon, through which science and technology were to be used to improve the conditions of human life and achieve social progress. The professions repre- sent our highest aspirations to knowledge and ethical conduct. A great American sociologist of the professions, Everett Hughes, said: The professional strikes a bargain with society. In return for his esoteric and important knowledge about matters of great social moment he is granted autonomy in his practice, a mandate for social control in the area of his expertise and a licence to determine who shall enter the profession.

For the last two hundred years, the professions have rested on a particular epistemology of practice, by which I mean a particular theory of the nature of professional knowledge. Edgar Schein has identified three levels of professional knowledge: basic science, applied science and everyday skills of practice. Depending on how we structure this triad, we get different pictures. If we put basic science at the base of a pyramid, applied science above it, and practice on top of that, we get a picture of the foundational relationships of knowledge. Practice is supposed to rest on applied science, which is supposed to rest on basic science. If we turn the pyramid upside down, we get a picture of an epistemological pecking order. Those of higher status are closest to basic science; those of lesser status, to applied science; and those of least status, to day-to-day practice.

The epistemology of practice underlying the professions is built into the professional schools, institutionalized in them even when professors and administrators do not agree with it. So the normative curriculum of the schools presents basic science first, then applied science and then a practicum whose purpose is to offer practice in applying science to instrumental problems of practice. The epistemology of practice institutionalized in the normative curriculum and the




separation of research from what practitioners actually do, I call technical rationality.

In the 1974 issue of Minerva, Edward Shils has described how technical rationality came to the United States. It happened after the Civil War. American students, who had gone to Germany to study, brought back with them the idea of the German university, the novel idea of the university as a place for the production of new knowledge (which had been thought to be the prerogative of gifted amateurs like Benjamin Franklin and Benjamin Rush). This idea took root in one institution, the Johns Hopkins Uni- versity, and from there, grew in power and in- fluence until it dominated the ethos of the modern research university. That left a problem for the professions. What was to happen to them? In 1916, Thorsten Veblen wrote The Order of Higher Learning in America. He was very angry because the Trustees of the University of Chicago wanted to bring a business school, of all things, into the university. Veblen argued that introducing a business school into the university would only embarrass its faculty. They would put on a specious show of scholarship and would be totally out of place. Veblen saw the university as the higher school, and the business school, like all professional schools, as a school of application, a lower school. He thought the relationship between higher and lower schools should conform to this bargain: from the higher schools, their knowledge; from the lower, their problems. Unfortunately, Veblen lost his battle. A business school did come into the University of Chicago and into other universities; and it was accompanied, of course, by schools of medicine, law, dentistry, forestry, engineering and police.

In 1956, an article appeared under the title, 'The Professionalization of Everyone?'. The price the professional schools paid for their admission to the universities was their acceptance of the university's theory of knowledge. They would accept the idea that professional knowledge consists in the application of science to instrumental problems of practice. They would accept Veblen's bargain.

In the last twenty years, professionals and educators have become increasingly aware of the indeterminate zones of practice illustrated by my earlier stories. They have become increasingly aware of situations of uncertainty, where the problem is not given and the difficulty is

precisely to discover the problem we are trying to solve. So the former Dean of the School of Engineering at MIT, Albert Keil, has observed, 'We know how to build ships very well; our problem is we do not know what ship to build.' And they have become aware of examples of artistry which are really quite unique. So Harvey Brooks, Dean of the School of Applied Physics at Harvard, could say, 'Engineering design is critically important and if it were known and constant it could be taught, but it is not constant.' Margaret MacVicar of MIT could, say, 'We have no rôle models for engineering designers.' And Ephraim Friedman, a former Dean of the School of Medicine at Boston Uni- versity, could say, 'You cannot hold physicians responsible for the terrible state of medical care; we only control two per cent of the system.' These eminent professionals voiced their awareness of uncertainty, uniqueness and conflict which cannot be handled through technical rationality.

Uncertain situations cannot be solved as technical problems because they do not yet exist as problems: the problem is to get from a mess to a problem, and that is not a technical problem. Unique situations, precisely because they are unique, do not fit the categories of existing theory and technique. Conflictual situations cannot be handled through technical rationality, because they lack clear, fixed, consistent ends.

Nevertheless, some professionals are very good at making sense of uncertain situations. There are wise politicians capable of taking conflictual situations and rendering them action- able. There are physicians who can deal with unique cases, that do not fit the book, in a very effective way. The difficulty is that none of these people can describe what they do as rigorous in explicit, understandable terms. So they confront, as we all do, a dilemma of rigour or relevance.

Imagine a topography of practice that consists of a high hard ground and a swamp below. On the high, hard ground, you can practise technical rationality. You can continue the research begun in a PhD thesis, run quan- titative, formal models of inventory control, or construct econometric analyses of consumer demand. In the swamp below, however, lie the messy, difficult and crucially important social problems on which you would like to work. Should you work on these problems to which you can apply methods you are able to describe

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS as rigorous, however trivial these problems may seem to you to be? Or should you work on the really important problems in the swamp, where you are unable to describe your work as rigorous in any way at all? This dilemma, in many different forms, afflicts members of the professions and professional schools in our time.

Indeed, professionals often do not help themselves, because they mystify their artistry. One says about a good designer, for example, 'He is visual', and about a poor one, 'He is simply un- visual', as though the capacity for design were God-given, literally inspired, as Plato said, or acquired by contagion from exposure to a master, but not in any other way describable.

In the last twenty to twenty-five years, as they have stumbled into zones of uncertainty, uniqueness and conflict, professionals have become increasingly aware of the limits of their knowledge and the inadequacy of technical rationality as an epistemology of practice. Just as they are awakening from their technical-rational slumber, however, they are caught up in the squeeze play of control and proceduralization where they have less and less freedom to exercise their wisdom and artistry. So what technical rationality makes dispensable, the squeeze play in the practice world makes inevitable. As I have visited a variety of professional schools in the last year or so, in the United States and other countries, I have come to believe that professions and their schools are at a crossroads. The issue is nothing less than their continued existence in the forms in which we have known them. The discretionary freedom on which they depend is being eroded, and at the same time they are becoming increasingly aware of zones of indeterminacy calling for wisdom and artistry that do not fit the model of knowledge they have long accepted as rigorous.

I propose now to turn this predicament on its head. Instead of asking how science or syste- matic professional knowledge can be applied to practice, let us ask, What is the nature of the artistry, the special competence, that practitioners display in their everyday practice when they successfully handle zones of indeterminacy?

In order to introduce this idea, I need to depart from formal lecturing. Suppose that I am on a bicycle. I am riding along and begin to fall to the left. In order to keep from falling I should turn my wheel to the . . .? Quick! How many 230

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think 'right'? How many think 'left'? How many don't know? How many think this is irrelevant?

I don't want to pull rank. What I should like you to do is to go out and test this for yourself. But let me offer the hypothesis that if you turn to the left, turn into the fall, you will have a pretty good chance of avoiding the fall; and if you try to turn to the right, you will surely fall. It has to do with where your centre of gravity is, and with the fact that a bicycle is a sort of gyroscope; but that sounds as if I know what I am talking about. I would prefer you to run the experiment.

Now, those of you who said 'turn the wheel to the right', I presume you frequently fall off your bicycles. No? Then how could you give the wrong answer and do the right thing?

We do have terms that describe the kind of competence you may possess - terms like 'intuition', 'instinct', 'savvy'. The philosopher, Michael Polanyi, in a series of famous lectures at Cambridge, called it tacit knowing. My old friend Raymond Hainer used to say, 'We know more than we can say, thank God!'. I call it knowing-in-action. It is the knowing we mani- fest in the doing. Its relationship to the knowing we are able to describe is the relationship of the part of the iceberg that is below the water to the small part above. Yet we are sometimes able to reflect on our knowing-in-action, observing what we do, constructing a description of it, using that description in action to help us re- think what we are doing. This process I call reflection in-action; thinking about the phenomenon before us, and how we have been thinking about it, in such a way as to restructure both our thinking and our doing. This is, I believe, a large part of what we mean by artistry. Designing, of the sort that architects and environmental designers do, is a prototype of the process.

Let me turn to an example of designing. It is a protocol of a dialogue between a studio master, Quist, and a student, Petra. (The names are fictitious, made up by my former student, Roger Simmonds, who recorded the interaction.) Petra has been given the problem of designing a school. She is a first-year student. Think of a studio loft, and think of Petra at her table and Quist bending over her, conducting a design review. She says, 'Here are the shapes. I have tried to butt these shapes [she has three L-shaped school rooms] into the contours of the slope . . . but they won't fit.' Quist puts a piece



FEBRUARY 1987 CHANGING PATTERNS OF INQUIRY IN WORK AND LIVING of tracing paper over her drawing and begins to draw as he talks, employing a special language of studio masters that is neither words alone nor drawing alone - a drawing-talking language in which drawing illustrates the talking and talking guides the drawing, neither making any sense at all without the other. Having put the tracing paper down, Quist says, 'The site is screwy. You have to impose a discipline; you can always break it open later.' Then he says, 'There could be geometry of parallels generated by these L-shaped forms.' And he begins now to draw the geometry of parallels into the screwy slope, commenting, 'This being the gully and this the hill, there could be a bridge here and it might come down two ways; one over here, and one by the steps. And if over here, there might be a precinct that opened up into here.' Then he says, 'Now this overall drop [and now he is talking about the drop from the highest of the three classrooms, the top of the highest, to the bottom of the lowest] is an interval of fifteen feet which breaks into three intervals of five feet, which is maximum height for a kid, right? The space in here could be a space of nooks.' (In this protocol, and in many others, nookness is goodness.) '. . . And the whole thing works slightly with the contours, which is enough.' Then he also says, 'Now this soft back-area to the hard-edged classrooms, this gallery . . .', and she says, 'I thought of it as a pass-through.' He says, 'Yes, it is a pass- through that anybody could pass through, but it is not a corridor. It is an artifice, the kind of thing that Aalto might invent; he's done that on occasion. In a minor way it is the major thing.'

I have merely memorized this protocol, having worked for six months to try to make sense of it. I will not take you through the whole of it. But let me go back over the piece I have just quoted.

Quist is working in a virtual world, the world of the sketchpad. It is not the real world, but it is a world that represents the real world and within it he is able to read through to the real world, so that it becomes transparent to him. For example, - making a line, he sees the bridge. Making con- tour lines, he sees the contours. He then lives within, moves within the virtual world he has created.

The situation as given is partly defined and partly undefined. It is a messy problematic situation and Quist' s message to Petra is, 'You must step into the problem and impose a coherence

on it, because basically the site is screwy'; meaning you cannot get the coherence from the site. The coherence has to come from you, you have to impose it. I cannot sufficiently emphasize the importance of this idea. In my experience, the last thing students will do is to believe in ideas that pass through their heads. They mostly believe, on the contrary, that if an idea passes through their head, it must be false - unlike Marshall McLuhan, who believed that if an idea went through his mind it was therefore true.

So Quist tells Petra that she has to impose an order, a coherence of her own devising, on the site; or as I like to say, she must frame the problematic situation so as to construct a problem that may be solvable. From this point of view, the whole exercise is a 'frame experiment', one function of which is to discover whether the problem as set can be solved. Then, if it can be solved, what happens? What are the consequences of solving it? One of the things Quist does is to ask himself, If I solve the problem this way, can I make something that I like out of what I get? He discovers a surprise - the gallery, initially a soft back-area to the hard-edged classrooms, about which he now says, 'In a minor way, it is the major thing.'

Quist conducts a 'reflective conversation' with his material. On the basis of a problem he has framed and a repertoire of ideas and moves, he begins to act on the situation - which then 'talks back' to him, not giving him feedback (a signal of error or match) but back-talk that suggests a new way of framing the problem of the situation. So he listens to the back-talk, he reframes the problem; and from this point on, will see the entire project in a new way, centring on the gallery, 'in a minor way, the major thing', and its implications governing further design.

Designing is understandable as a reflective conversation with materials, a process of reflection-in-action undertaken within a virtual world that designers learn to manipulate and create, a process in which uncertain situations are framed and problems are constructed. In this process, designers make the things they deal with, conduct experiments to discover whether the problems they have set can be solved, and sometimes reframe the situation on the basis of back-talk that suggests, 'There is quite another problem here than the one I first saw.'

Designing is a prototype of artistry, understood as reflection in action. Let me take you

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS back to my early stories. When the operators at Three Mile Island saw the data that said 'Water level going up, pressure going down', the proper response (this is Monday morning quarter- backing - I was not there) was to be confused, because in fact the data were contradictory; there was nothing in the book that made them understandable. But the operators could not allow themselves to be confused. Instead, they took the procrustean step of cutting away half the data, responding only to water level; so they turned the emergency water off, which took the reactor toward meltdown. In order to prevent the situation from going toward disaster, they would have had to allow themselves to be uncertain for a while. Keats called that 'negative capacity': the capacity to forgo an irritable reaching after certainty. The operators would have had to allow themselves to be uncertain and reflect on what the weird data could possibly mean. But, of course, in order to do this, they would also have had to have some rather fundamental understanding of the reactor, which they might then bring into connection with the weird data. They needed to be able to reflect-in-action, which the multiplication of procedures makes impossible.

Let me turn to another example. Imagine a group of teachers in a school watching a videotape of two boys playing a game called 'pattern blocks'. Pattern blocks are flat blocks with different shapes, sizes and colours. The boys are separated from each other by an opaque wall. The teachers can see them both because there are television cameras above them. One boy has a pattern; the other, a lot of blocks. The first gives the second directions for making the pattern he sees before him. The teachers watch this thing happening, and afterwards make their comments.

Because they saw the second boy get very confused and begin to make terrible mistakes, the teachers said things like, 'This boy does not know how to follow directions', 'He has a poor short-term memory', 'He is a slow learner'. Then one of the teachers noticed, or thought she noticed, that the first boy had given an impossible direction: he had said, 'Put down a green square', when there were no green squares and the only squares were orange. So they ran the tape backwards and looked again and, sure enough, the first boy had given an impossible direction. He had said, 'Put down a green 232

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square.' Thereafter, as the teachers watched this videotape, they were absolutely thunderstruck. Now the second boy did not look at all stupid. He looked not like a slow learner but a virtuoso direction-follower, who succeeded in making sense of impossible directions. As the teachers talked afterwards, they said, 'We gave the kid reason.' They behaved as though the boy's crazy-seeming behaviour must make some sense and their problem was to discover the sense it made.

If teachers teach so as to 'give kids reason', they will become researchers in practice. They will have to be asking themselves continually, 'What can be the sense of the funny, odd, sometimes stupid-sounding things these kids are actually saying?' Such teaching is a kind of reflection-in-action, wherein teachers ask themselves 'What is the meaning of what they are doing?' and (I think most important) 'What are they making of what I am doing?'

There is one last example I should like particularly to mention, for I may have been understood as saying, 'Science is the villain', and that is not at all my meaning. My meaning is that a certain conception of science is the villain. We learn to treat science as a body of knowledge, the kind of things professional journals publish after the fact of research, and thereby lose sight of the before-the-fact processes that make the knowledge. An old friend of mine, Ed Shanley, used to talk about an article in a professional journal on the behaviour of hydrogen peroxide under changing conditions of pressure and tempera- ture. You could read the whole article, Shanley said, without discovering that what really happened was that the back of a plant had blown up. Scientists often protect us from their before-the- fact inquiries. When they let us see them, on occasion, they reveal a design-like process of reflection-in-action. So I want to quote something by a wonderful woman named Barbara McLintock (some of you may know of her; she won the Nobel prize at the age of eighty-two). McLintock is the person who discovered 'jump- ing genes'. It is a fundamental doctrine of molecular biology that the genome does not change, that DNA does not change except through genetic variation and mutation. McLintock was riot so sure, however. Over many years, she did maize genetic research at Cold Spring Harbour, where she cultivated maize and came to be known (to some) as 'that




crazy old bag at Cold Spring Harbour'. When Watson and the others were inventing molecular biology, she was growing her maize. She kept arguing that the genes could change in the course of an organism's development, and eventually other geneticists caught up with her and she won the Nobel Prize.

In a book about McClintock called A Feeling for the Organism , Evelyn Fox Keller includes the following quotation: Over and over [she tells us] one must have the time to look, the patience to hear what the material has to say to you, the openness to let it come to you, above all one must have a feeling for the organism. No two plants are exactly alike. They are all different and as a consequence you have to note the difference. I start with the seedling and I don't want to leave it. I don't feel that I really know the story if I don't watch the plant all the way along, so I know every plant in the field. I know them intimately and I find it a great pleasure to know them.

For Barbara McLintock the discovery of transposition of genes was above all a key to the complexity of genetic organization, an indicator of the subtlety with which cytoplasm, mem- branes and DNA are integrated into a single structure, and it is the overall organization or orchestration that enables the organism to meet its needs, whatever they might be, in ways that never cease to surprise us. That capacity for surprise gives McLintock immense pleasure. She recalls, for example, the early post World War

Two studies on the effect of radiation on Drosophila (the fly). It turned out, she says, that the flies that had been under constant radiation were more vigorous than those that were standard. 'Well, it was hilarious. It was absolutely against everything that had been thought earlier. I thought it was terribly funny,' she says, 'I was utterly delighted.'

This awareness of surprise, this reframing and rethinking of categories and problems on the basis of surprise, on the spot in a situation of action, is what I mean by reflection-in-action. It is what I think designing as an activity - perhaps I ought to say 'good designing' - typifies. The lack of it, in the preparation and behaviour of professionals, threatens us, on the one hand, with drab routinization and, on the other, in situations of great technological complexity, with catastrophe.

We must enhance our capacity to reflect-in- action, along with our ability to describe what we mean by wisdom and artistry in practice. We need to do this especially in professional education, where the design studio can function as a prototype for other professions. (I like the phrase 'reflective practicum' as a term for the generalized version of a design studio.) In operating organizations, the enhancement of reflection-in-action is part of a larger programme, liberating the capacity of human beings to think reflectively and productively about their own work.

DISCUSSION

PROFESSOR ROBERT K. MACLEOD (Head, School of Architecture and Interior Design, Brighton Poly- technic): Your clear presentation touched on the crisis in the professions. It seems to me ironic that the design professions, in which you see your model for reflection-in-action, are probably of all the professions the ones that were first assaulted historically by having to go by the book. I wonder if you would care to comment on the fact that we have had, particularly since 1848, in this country, increasing quantities of building legislation and then subsequently in this century more and more planning legislation, dealing increasingly with the soft issues, the qualitative issues, which pre- empt and anticipate the very judgements that ought to be coming out of reflection-in-action. The profession in this country has been finding itself justifying its existence, while it is supposed to be carrying the burden of responsibility to society, on an ever narrower base. Society is going to suggest that they don't want us, because every time they see a problem they quantify

it and put it in the book and then it does not matter who does it. Would you accept that problem? From what I understand you to say, that is the kind of problem that has been emerging in recent decades with physicists and others, whereas architects lived with it for over a century.

the lecturer: Maybe that phenomenon in architecture has to do with the fact that buildings began to fall down before nuclear reactors began to go critical. If I had said that because proceduralization restricts creativity and on-the-spot capacity for reflection, we should therefore do away with procedures, I ought clearly to have my head examined. The issue is, what kinds of procedures should we have, and what relationships should hold between them and practitioners' on-the-spot thinking? The second issue is the theory of action by which

governmental agencies and other forms of institutionalized authority respond to catastrophe. When

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things go wrong, the response is usually to try to fix them by increasing the level of control. Every time we respond to something going wrong by increasing control, we assume both that our theory of what is going on is correct and that the particular phenomenon we seek to control will reappear in the future. Of course, the new disasters do not always replicate old ones. The theory of control is ineffective, but we keep on using it.

I have the feeling that professionals respond to society's attempt to decrease their autonomy, out of social dissatisfaction with their performance, by feeling themselves to be injured parties, without grasping that people really are dissatisfied. There may be something right about that dissatisfaction. And yet the theory of control by which society tends to respond to dissatisfaction is not effective. When I had more to do with the building industry

than I have at present, we were interested in performance criteria and performance standards. A performance standard or criterion allows designers and builders to vary their choice of particular materials and product specifications, so long as functional requirements are met. So it is a way of responding to their dilemma I have just described. But, as my colleagues and I discovered at the Bureau of Standards, it is very difficult to say what performance criteria should look like. The study of performance criteria and experimentation with their use - especially the kind of experimentation that tries to incorporate social dissatisfaction in the design of criteria - would be a productive way of responding to the particular dilemma you point out. As to the irony of architects being first, architects, I

think, are anomalous in the modern world. You are throwbacks to an epistemology of practice that precedes the dominant one, and yet you are still around.

PROFESSOR ALBERT CHERNS (Emeritus Professor and Visiting Fellow, Science Policy Research Unit, University of Sussex): I should like to take up this question of procedures. You said that science was not the villain but there is a kind of practice of science which teaches that if you follow the procedures you will get appropriate results. Sometimes the results were favourable and sometimes not. When they were not, this did not disprove the theory nor did it in- validate the procedures. All it showed was that you had not followed the procedures appropriately. This is very much at the bottom of multiplication of procedures. You also commented on the ability, or presumed

ability, of the professional to use his discretion. You even went so far down the professions as to describe the actions of the operators in Three Mile Island. But one can go very much lower than that. Many years ago the railway unions made a great discovery, that there was no need to go on strike and forfeit pay; all you had to do was to follow the procedures, work to rule, and 234

PROCEEDINGS if you did that the trains did not leave the station and if by any mischance they did, they never came back. What this proved was that for three hundred and fifty odd days in the year people were making the system work despite the procedures, and that in fact we rely on the very discretion that we seek to stifle by means of procedures. You also described an ingrained wish on the part of

management, and indeed of all of us, to convert uncertainty to certainty. The notion of converting uncertainty to certainty is one way of ensuring that we shall get those nasty surprises. One of the things that the professional does, however, is to convert uncertainty to risk, so that although the uncertainty is there it is in a form which is at least familiar enough for one to be able to put some degree of priority on what would be the worst thing to do and what would be the best. I think this aspect ought to be added to the account you gave.

THE LECTURER: I agree with and appreciate each comment you have made.

DR WILLIAM ALLEN (Partner in Architectural Practice, Bickerdike Allen Partners): I am fascinated by what you said about performance requirements. The United Kingdom Government in its wisdom has at last written its building regulations entirely in the form of performance requirements. Performance requirements were invented in 1934 at the Building Research Station because that organization, having been invented in 1919 to lead the building industry in this country into the age of science, found within a matter of ten to fifteen years that with a prescriptive set of building regulations there was no point in doing research, because there was no option open to you to make any use of knowledge other than that which was static within the system. So they persuaded the govern - ment of the time to agree to allow the regulatory system, what you would call codes, to migrate on to a performance basis. The war came too soon for anything serious to

happen and when the war was over the situation was different in the sense that everybody was expected to innovate and therefore you had to break regulations. The Building Research Station had to invent criteria, and those became institutionalized in 1965 as a half- way house to performance regulations. On 11th November last year there came into full flower the present form, supported by documents which explain how you can go about satisfying the requirements. That of course requires shelves of textbooks, but it is being compressed by the wisdom of that department into a few slim little volumes. We have opened the statement of requirements very

logically to say what buildings should do, we have opened the way to self-certification. You are postulat- ing a state of marvellous wisdom on behalf of the




professions and the building industry that they can implement these things, because that is all the knowledge necessary to exploit options, many of which are wholly innovatory and will, like Three Mile Island, come unstuck in certain cases. But it is an interesting problem, because it is a highly logical move forward and it was attempted at the Bureau of Standards, where you and I were involved. It is fifty years old as an idea and we have still to see whether it is going to work and how we are going to build up the knowledge base by which people can move with less inaccuracy into this state of open decision-making.

THE LECTURER: I think that issue raises the question of the possibility of experimentation in practice. Can you run experiments not just in the laboratory but in work? I talked once to Maurice Smith at MIT about the notion that architecture involves experimentation. He said, 'I never experiment; it just gets more and more beautiful.' There is a disposition not to frame professional activity as experimentation, because it sounds as if you do not know what you are doing. Yet, if I am right, zones of indeterminancy are very important to practice. It sounds as though you, too, are saying that performance criteria open up opportunity for indeterminancy, where the effective performance of a configuration or a set of materials may not reveal itself for quite a long time. Opportunity for experimentation is another story

altogether. Yet professionals experiment all the time. Physicians experiment when they do not know what is going on within the patient. Lawyers experiment when they are testing a judge whom they really do not know. Teachers, if they are good, experiment when they confront a student who just seems bizarre. And yet that kind of experimentation we have a very hard time honouring because it smacks of a lack of expertise. Where your comments would lead us would be to mark off zones of legitimate experimentation in building activity, anticipating the dilemmas of safety and cost that arise when we do so.

MR JAMES H. ARMSTRONG (Partner, Building Design Partnership): A lot of the situations in which we find ourselves, particularly in the building industry, involve interaction between professionals of many different kinds. This creates special problems and also special opportunities. Do you think that the idea of reflection-in-action carries over into corporate activities as well as individual ones?

the lecturer: I think I must have you on my payroll. That open up a whole zone of the speech which I did not give, for lack of time. Structural engineers, architects, landscape architects, contractors and people who use buildings and manage buildings really do speak quite different languages. The American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a

very beautiful building, and a colleague and I paid a lot of attention to one corner of it. There is a wall within a wall, you see a framed window, you can see a meeting room inside, there is a hidden entrance. The outer wall is brick and it is stepped and each step is topped with granite. Bill Porter, my colleague, was talking about it in terms of the 'cut' in the wall and the meaning of that cut. He related it to the architect's ideas about inside/outside, about the Academy of Sciences as a place for great conversations which wanted to be open to the world but not vulnerable to it. Then it occurred to Bill to wonder how a contractor would see that and whether a contractor might think, why two walls when one would do? A structural engineer might raise questions about which of these walls is load-bearing and why we need to double the load-bearing capacity and what happens at the joints between the glass. What we call design is not only the thing that goes

on in the person's mind or even the thing that goes on in the virtual world of the sketchpad, but also a social act, increasingly corporate, to use your word, undertaken among people who speak different languages and frame reality in quite different ways. If that is true, the wonder is not that they occasionally misunderstand one another, but that they ever understand one another at all. The kind of reflection-in-action that is pertinent here you could call 'frame-reflection'. It has to do with translation or cross-talk, depending upon how you conceive of the process. But if you speak a language very different from mine, your world having within it 'schedules of trades' and my world not; your world 'load-bearing walls', and mine not, and so on, how is it that I may get inside your world to discover the meaning of my terms there? And how is it that you ever get inside mine? The capacity for framed-reflection is critically important to designers. Many colleagues at MIT who are designers keep

educating me in design. One of them is very committed to the notion that designing involves agreements; whatever else happens, there must be agreement on something to be built, arrived at by people who come to it from very different sources. The process of frame- reflection, by which we may arrive at reasoned agreement is learnable. The relationship between a student and a studio master may contain a frame-conflict. The studio master simply has words and things in his world that that student does not have, and the reverse may also be true. What is supposed to happen is that the student enters into the studio master's understanding of his world and the studio master tries to do the same for the student. That is a zone in which design studios are not always very good. It is possible for people involved in corporate design to work at the process of trying to enter into one another's worlds, talk across one another's languages. It is time-consum- ing, hard to do, but extremely worthwhile in designing and education for designing and in many other areas of professional and non-professional life.

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS MR MICHAEL WIGGINTON, MA, riba (Architect):

I think that instinct is something that you learn by doing something, but which is put to one side, as something which it is unnecessary to identify as a specific piece of knowledge. In learning to ride a bicycle you learn all sorts of things as pieces of instinct, but you do not bother to identify them. They come in useful from time to time. An airline pilot probably does the same sort of thing, but that seems to me to be about half-way between riding a bicycle and running a nuclear reactor. The number of things that you have to learn instinctively in order to run something as highly technical as a nuclear reactor is so enormous that you would have to spend a very long time picking up all these pieces of unidentified knowledge. You would probably need degrees in computer technology, physics, engineering and design of the reactor, in order to be able to read everything and do the same sort of instinctive thing that prevented you from falling off the bicycle. So my first question is: Can you actually teach people that? My second question, to do with designing really, is: can you teach inventiveness, which is the reverse side of the same coin?

THE LECTURER: An assumption underlying your question has to do with the nature of knowledge. There was a very good book called Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, which tells about people who have a feeling for the way motor cycles work. You can be very good at maintaining motor cycles without having a degree in motor-cycle maintenance. In fact, having a degree is sometimes an obstacle. MIT undergraduates are a very bizarre group; they

all come out of the first two per cent of the nation's maths scores and they have this peculiar property as a group, that when they work on a computer and something happens which astonishes them, they do not say 'I lack maths aptitude'; they say 'Wow, what was that?'. This attitude, being energized and excited by surprising puzzles, coupled with hands-on experience by doing things and therefore learning patterns of regularity, is tremendously important for the capacity to reflect-in-action in an understandable way. The familiar hierarchy of higher and lower schools - computer science and therefore understanding computers, reactor science and therefore understanding reactors - is very hard to get away from. In the Three Mile Island episode, what eventually

happened was that one manager said, 'Henceforth we will act on the assumption that the core has been uncovered and is damaged.' He was the only one who did, and no one else supported him. He had no particular competence in nuclear technology that others did not have, but he had the willingness to size up the situation and take what in the context was a very courageous stand, based on the understanding that he did have. From that episode I would draw two con- clusions. One is that the confidence we want is not

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only confidence for understanding but the courage to act on understanding in an organizational setting that may punish us for it. I don't know how to optimize the make-up of an

operating team in a nuclear reactor, if we want to increase the likelihood of reflection-in-action; but in working on that question I would not make the assumption that advanced degrees were the solution.

MR TERENCE BENDIXSON : I am interested in reducing road casualties and I should like to go back to the question of procedures and to consider whether the growth of them has been connected with the growth of government. We in this country attempt to reduce the number of very young children who are killed on the roads by a set of procedures called the Green Cross Code which are introduced to children by various theatrical games. It is widely believed that the code is successful, although if you look carefully at the statistics this is a dubious pro- position. It looks more as if any reduction in deaths amongst younger children since the introduction of the Green Cross Code is explained by events such as the movement of people out of old-fashioned inner city streets, the spread of motor cars, the travelling of children in cars rather than on their own feet, and social changes, such as parents becoming more pro- tective. It goes against convention in road safety circles to say this, because the Green Cross Code is what we have put our faith in and what we are teaching. When the children grow up a bit and get to ten or

fourteen and start behaving like adults, terrible things happen. The fatalities have been getting worse every year. Why? Those children who have been taught the Green Cross Code are going out on the roads on their own, are imitating adults, are making mistakes and are getting killed. Of course this is a major concern to the road safety industry but nobody can come up with any new procedures. This is because nobody is prepared to codify what adults do because what adults do is patently dangerous. Adults aim for the rear bumper of the last car in a gap and go for it, and that is thought to be a pretty crazy technique to teach children. So we don't teach them anything. We have a serious problem on our hands, but because we cannot come up with a set of procedures to solve it, a sort of adolescent Green Cross Code, we are baulked. A more promising course of action would be to say

government cannot do anything. It is up to parents. It is for them to get out on the streets with their children, play games with them and help them to understand the dynamics of the road. Governments have a pro- pensity to try and solve problems by procedures. We have more and more government, we have more and more procedures - is this part of the dilemma in our society?




THE LECTURER: It really is part of the dilemma that I see, but what it also does is raise the ante. Your examples raises the question of what it would mean for a government to reflect-in-action. When you say the most promising response would be for governments to say 'It is up to parents', I think that move on your part is based on a negative answer to the question I just posed. Maybe you are right. But there is a possibility that not all governments are incapable of the kind of learning involved in reflection-in-action. Reading the data so as to prove the effectiveness of the Green Cross Code, at least as you frame the example, serves the purpose of giving us a warm feeling that we know what we are doing. Reading it as you read it, sceptically in the light of alternative interpretations of the meaning, makes people very uncomfortable because it gets rid of that kind of certainty. If we were to do a very careful analysis of the data

with multiple hypotheses in mind, and we took three or four years over it and published our report, we might find that by that time the situation had changed. This is an example of factors that affect the question, can governments learn? The question is crucially important, and you could have produced endless examples of it. What are the possible conditions under which a

government could learn to reflect on its own practice and restructure it on the basis of experimentation, taking account of change and the instability of policies based upon obsolete data? The Works Progress Admin- istration under Franklin Roosevelt in the Depression was a work relief organization. The idea was to give people work, and use the work for productive social purposes. Several things made it unique. One was that it lasted a long time but always under the illusion that it was temporary. A second was that the organization had quite a remarkable information system, including a woman journalist who wrote wonderful pieces about the agency's work and told Harry Hopkins what was happening. A third was that they really thought experimentally about their programmes, con- fronting dilemmas that arise the moment such a thing is tried. For example, if everybody experiments, what happens to uniformity and consistency of policy? The people experimenting have to have internalized prin-

ciples central to the agency's mission and identity. This seemed to happen in the WPA, apparently due to Hopkins himself. There was a great deal of discretionary freedom given to the localities, a lot of information about experiments that flowed upward and outward, and a great deal of improvisation. When there was a drought in the South-West for example, and a lot of cattle were dying, local agents had the idea of employing men to slaughter the cattle and feed the people who were hungry. Interestingly, the WPA was imitated by the Canadian

Local Initiatives Programme in the sixties, and then imitated again in England in the Youth Employment Programme, except that the Youth Employment Pro- gramme thought it was copying Canada and the WPA dropped out of sight. I am not sure how much of the spirit of local experimentation, network learning and improvisatory use of data was reproduced. Some few people have to develop a feel for the data in order for this to happen. I think it happened in Operational Research in Britain during World War II, in the bomb tracking and submarine search programmes.

It is not as if there are not examples, it is just that they are very rare. The question of how to create conditions for them is at least equal in importance to the one we have been discussing.

the CHAIRMAN: I usually find that being made to think is very hard work, but Donald Schon has made us think hard this evening and he has actually made it fun as well. I should like to propose a vote of thanks to him and I should like you to applaud it.

SIR PETER BALDWIN, KCB (Chairman of Council of the Society): This is an important event in the calendar of the Society and the standard of these Cubitt lectures is a notable element in the programme. I never cease to marvel at how the standard is main- tained, but I suppose if we are clever enough, with the assistance of the trustees of the Thomas Cubitt Trust, to get the Ford Professor of the Massachusetts Insti- tute of Technology, we are not doing too badly; and we have learned this evening what that can mean. We also have a distinguished chairman this evening and I should like to add our thanks to him for presiding.

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