Applying the Power of Schön’s Reflexive Practice

How reflexive practice can get you your next job in fashion, user experience, service design or any area in the creative industries

I am often asked for advice on careers in design. I also see a lot of discussions and advice on working in the creative industries. Most often this focuses on the wisdom of some self-appointed super important expert, pontificating on how to create a great portfolio. This level of discussion is frankly embarrassing for our industry. For anyone (new entrant or seasoned practitioner, the advice on portfolios is easy, clear and common-sense. Portfolios must showcase, high-quality work that you can talk convincingly about.

Surely, we there is a bit more to breaking in and sustaining a career in creative? Let’s start with you. Maybe, you’re straight out of school, or mid-career or perhaps wanting to move into design from some other kind of work? Maybe you just really, really need a job and your naturally creative? I want to focus on the one aspect that underpins all of these different situations, how to be credible, stay credible and be the best in your field, whether that is fashion, user experience, illustration or whatever create career you want or have already.

Naturally, there is no shortage of advice on getting jobs and maintaining a career in all kinds of different situations, which each have their own unique challenges. Guidance, again is usually at the common-sense end of the spectrum, such as doing good personal marketing, having clear goals and roadmaps and sustaining a strong professional network. These are all super important activities, everyone should be doing, whatever you do. But the credibility side of things is much more than vision and perception, it ought to be wove into everything we do — our practice.

This is where, we need to go beyond the airport literature and seek advice from the professionals. And in this case, on the importance of being a great, solid, reliable and in demand practitioner, I call on Donald Schön. Schön’s (relatively) famous The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action (1983) links to key facets together than transform commodified work into conscious work. Firstly, the notion of practitioner is one that assimilates professional development into doing work. Secondly, connecting the doing of practice to reflexivity, incorporates the personal, internalising development on the knowledge of doing to doing the work at hand (practice).

This rather obtuse construction is more commonly known, in its marketing friendly guise of ‘passion’. You’ll all of heard how important it is to be passionate about what your do. How having passion for your chosen domain and the energy you bring is critical to success at an individual and team level. These are all manifestations of Schön’s studies on professionals in action. Commitment to reflexive practice, means making value through what you do and working it continuously, recursively reflecting on what you do, how you do it, how it connects to what other people are doing and many more aspects of connecting practice with knowledge.

The opposite? Well, that would be doing by rote, routine, orthodoxy, submission or ennui. This is where the natural divergence in creative practice, between methods and mastery comes in. In either case, reflexivity means connecting what you do to the wider body of knowledge or culture that is relevant to your own domain, whether couture or socio-technical systems. If you have research in your portfolio, then you ought to know how that research connects up into the heavy stuff of theory at some level. If you have amazing design work, then how the work connects to the broader design culture should be implicit to the narrative. As is common with these types of articles, it par for the course to end with some top five tips — So here are the top five tips for Creative Reflexive Practice

Reflect — Maintain a notebook and sketchbook and discuss with peers

Contextualise — Know your practice heritage, traditions and foundations

Respect — Understand the practices of the people you work with and your own tradition — fight for principles and compromise for collaborative progress

Experiment — Don’t do by rote, always try different ways of doing as a way of learning

Contribute — Share what you know (whatever it is, at whatever level),

John Knight © 2018

The Reflective Practitioner: How professionals think in action. London: Temple Smith, 1983.